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A STUDY OF 

HISTORY 



The Royal Institute of International Affairs is 
an unofficial and non-political body, founded in 
1920 to encourage and facilitate the scientific 
study of international questions. 

The Institute, as such, is precluded by its rules 
from expressing an opinion on any aspects of 
international affairs ; opinions expressed in this 
booh are, therefore, purely individual. 



A STUDY OF 

HISTORY 

BY 

ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE 

Director of Studies in the Royal Institute 
of International Affairs 
Research Professor of International History 
in the University of London 
(both on the Sir Daniel Stevenson Foundation ) 



But at my back I always hear 
Time's wingid chariot hurrying near. 

ANDREW MARVELL 

voieiv rt 8 «t is yow yhapov. 

THEOCRITUS: Kmlaxas ’Epars, 1. 7° 

yrjpdonco 8 ' aiel iroAAo 8 t&ao>eo/i«vor. 

SOLON 


My times are in Thy hand. 

Ps. xxxi. is, in the A.V. 


But Thou art the same, and Thy 
years shall have no end. 

Ps. cii. 27 , in the A.V. 

• 1 


VOLUME VIII 


Issued under the auspices of the 
Royal Institute of International Affairs 



OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 

LONDONYORK TORONTO 

1954 


r 


I-r > 

: £ (Nev* r 


Oxford University Press, Amen House, London E.C.4 

GLASGOW HEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE WELLINGTON 
BOK«»V CALCUTTA MADRAS KARACHI CATX TOWH IBADAN 

Geoffrey Cumberlege, Publisher to the University 


PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN 


r.K ' 

..’»j . .. A\. 

a oc. rc#. 2>Vo . 

D &' '. 

MX- 






CONTENTS 

/VIII. HEROIC AGES 

■CT A. THE GENESIS OF A LIMES 

* J B. A SOCIAL BARRAGE .... 

’'l THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE 
I' ‘The Wreckful Siege of Battering Days’ 

\The Impracticability of a Policy of Non-Intercoursc . 

The Barbarians’ Exploitation of their Civilized Neighbours’ Weapons 
The Barbarians’ Exploitation of their Native Terrain 
J The Besieged Civilization’s Inability to Redress the Balance by Re- 
course to Organization and Technique 
The Barbarians’ Military Elusivencss and Economic Parasitism 
The Self-Defeat of a Policy of Setting a Thief to Catch a Thief 

D. THE CATACLYSM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 
'j* A Reversal of Roles ...... 

The Demoralization of the Barbarian Conquerors 
The Bankruptcy of a Fallen Ci%'ilized Empire’s Barbarian Successor- 
States ....... 

The Restraining Influences of Aidfis, Nemesis, and Hilm 
The Outbreak of an Invincible Criminality . 

The DdbScle of an Ephemeral Barbarian Ascendancy 

E. DICHTUNG UND WAHRHEIT . 

I. A PHANTASY OF HEROISM 


A 

03 


( 

-i 


U. A GENUINE HUMBLE SERVICE .... 

IX. CONTACTS BETWEEN CIVILIZATIONS 
SPACE (encounters between contemporaries) 
A. AN EXPANSION OF THE FIELD OF STUDY 

I. THE SELF-TRANSCENDENCE OF CIVILIZATIONS . 

OF RELIGIONS IN MEBTINGPLACBS OP 


II. BIRTHPLACES 
CIVILIZATIONS 

III. A CLASSIFICATION 
CIVILIZATIONS 


OF TYPES OF CONTACT BETWEEN 


B. A SURVEY OF ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEM 
PORARY CIVILIZATIONS 


12 

12 

*3 

x6 

>9 

2 S 
3i 
39 

45 

45 

46 

50 

53 

59 

64 

73 

73 

81 


IN 


88 


90 


97 


106 



I. A PLAN OF OPERATIONS .... 

II. OPERATIONS ACCORDING TO PLAN 

(fl) ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MODERN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 
i. The Modem West and Russia . 

Russia’s ‘Western Question’ . 

Channels of Western Cultural Radiation into Russia 


106 

126 

126 

126 

126 

128 






vi CONTENTS 

Alternative Russian Responses to the Challenge of Western 
Technology . . . . . .130 

The Race between the West’s Technological Ad vance and Russia’s 
Technological Westernization .... 136 

The Soviet Union’s Encounter with the United States. . 141 

2. The Modem West and the Main Body of Orthodox Christendom . 150 
The Difference between the Ottoman Orthodox Christian and the 

Muscovite Reaction to the West . . . .150 

The Ottoman Greek Orthodox Christian Phobia of the West . 151 

The Defeat of Cyril Loxikaris . . . . . 152 

The Frustration of Evylnios Votilgharis . . . 160 

The Revolution in the Ottoman Orthodox Christians’ Attitude 
towards the West . . . . . .161 

The Revolution in the West’s Attitude towards Orthodox 
Christianity ...... 165 

Channels of Western Cultural Penetration into an Ottoman 
Orthodox Christendom ..... 168 

The Reception of a Modern Western Culture by the Ottoman 
Orthodox Christians and its Political Consequences . . 182 

The Ottoman Millet System of Communal Autonomy. . 184 

The Fiasco of the Phanariots’ 'Great Idea’ . . .187 

The Disruption of an Ottoman Orthodox Christendom by a 

Modem Western Nationalism . . . .189 

Russia’s Competition with the West for the Ex-Ottoman Orthodox 
Christians’ Allegiance . . . . .192 

3. The Modem West and the Hindu World . . .198 

Likenesses and Differences in the Situations of a Hindu Society 

under British Rule and an Ottoman Orthodox Christendom . 198 

The Reception of a Modem Western Culture and its Political 
Consequences ...... 200 

The Gulf between a Hindu and a Post-Christian Western 

Weltanschauung ...... 205 

The Aloofness of a Reformed British Civil Service in India . 207 
The Unsolved Problem of a Rising Pressure of Population . 213 

4. The Modem West and the Islamic World . . .216 

The Encirclement of the Islamic World by the West, Russia, and 

Tibet . . . . . . .216 

The Postponement of the Crisis .... 219 

The Muslim Peoples’ Military Approach to the Western Question 232 
The Salvaging of an Ottoman Society by Selim III, Mehmed 
'All, and Mahm&d II . . . . 239 

The Collapse in Turkey and Egypt at the Beginning of the Last 
Quarter of the Nineteenth Century .... 249 

The Failure of the Arabs to Respond to a Continuing Challenge 
of Western Aggression ..... 257 

The Failure of a Turkish Committee of Union and Progress to 
Maintain the Ottoman Empire . . . .261 

The Success of Mustafi KernSl Atattirk in Creating a Turkish 
National State ...... 263 

Russia’s Competition with the West for an Ascendancy over the 
Islamic World ...... 268 


1 





CONTENTS vii 

5. The Modern West and the fetes . . . .272 

The Peculiarities of the Western Province of a Jewish Diaspora’s 

Domain ....... 272 

The Persecution of the Peninsular Jews under a Visigothic 
Catholic Christian Regime ..... 277 

The Respite for the Peninsular Jews under Andalusian and 
Ottoman Muslim Regimes ..... 280 

The Causes of the Western Christians’ Ill-treatment of the Jews 281 
The Plot of the Jewish Tragedy in a Western Christendom . 285 
A Mirage of Enfranchisement. . . . .286 

The Fate of the European Jews and the Palestinian Arabs, A.D. 

1933-48 . . . . . . .288 

Causes of the Failure of Enfranchisement . . . 292 

Inherent Consequences of the Captivation of the Jews by a 
Modem Western Gentile Nationalism . . . 295 

Inherent Consequences of Zionism’s Departure from a Tradi¬ 
tional Jewish Practice of Political Quietism . . . 298 

The Effects of the First World War on the Destiny of Palestine 301 
Great Britain’s Responsibility for the Catastrophe in Palestine . 303 
Germany’s and the United States’ Responsibility for the Catas¬ 
trophe in Palestine ...... 306 

The Retrospect and the Outlook .... 309 

6. The Modern West and the Far Eastern and Indigenous American 

Civilizations . . . . . . 313 

The Perils of Ignorance . . . . - 3*3 

The Fate and Future of the Indigenous American Civilizations 315 
Chinese and Japanese Reactions to the Impact of an Early Modem 
West . . . . . . .316 

Chinese and Japanese Reactions to the Impact of a Late Modem 

West . . . . . . .324 

The Unsolved Problem of a Rising Pressure of Population . 330 

A Communist Russia’s Chinese Fifth Column. . . 334 

7. Characteristics of the Encounters bctioeen the Modem West and its 

Contemporaries up to Date ..... 337 

(6) ENCOUNTERS WITH MEDIEVAL WESTERN CHRISTENDOM . . 346 

x. The Flow and Ebb of the Crusades .... 346 

2. The Medieval West and the Syriac World . . . 363 

3. The Medieval West and Greek Orthodox Christendom . 375 

4. The Medieval West and Kievan Russia . . . 398 

(c) ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CIVILIZATIONS OF THE FIRST TWO GENERATIONS 403 

x. Encounters with the Post-Alexandrine Hellenic Civilization . 403 
Likenesses and Differences between the Post-Alexandrine Hel¬ 
lenic and the Modem Western Eruption . . . 403 

The Flow and Ebb of Post-Alexandrine Hellenism . . 407 

The Epiphany of Higher Religions . . . .416 

2. Encounters with the Pre-Alexandrine Hellenic Civilization . 418 
The Hellenic Society’s Offensive in the Mediterranean Basin . 418 
The Syriac Society’s Political Consolidation for Self-Defence . 423 
The Achaemenian Empire’s Counter-Offensive . . 430 


viii CONTENTS 

The Aftermath on the Political Plane .... 435 

The Aftermath on the Cultural Plane .... 437 

3. Encounters with the Syriac Civilization . . . 439 

4. Encounters with the Egyptiac Civilization in the Age of 'the New 

Empire’ ....... 447 

5. Tares and Wheat . . . . . - 45 * 

C. THE DRAMA OF ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CON¬ 

TEMPORARIES (STRUCTURE, CHARACTERS, AND 

PLOT). 454 

I. CONCATENATIONS OF ENCOUNTERS .... 454 

n. ROLBS, REACTIONS, AND DENOUEMENTS . . .464 

(a) AGENTS AND REAGENTS ...... 464 

( b ) ALTERNATIVE POSSIBLE REACTIONS ..... 466 

(c) ALTERNATIVE POSSIBLE DENOUEMENTS . . . .476 

D. THE PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEP¬ 

TION .4S1 

I. THE DIFFUSION OF CULTURE ..... 481 

II. THE DIFFRACTION OF CULTURE . . . . -495 

Culture-Patterns and their Instability .... 495 

The Conduciveness of Cultural Disintegration to Cultural Inter¬ 
course ....... 501 

Decomposition through Diffraction .... 508 

Inverse Selection through Transmission . . . 514 

E. THE CONSEQUENCES OF ENCOUNTERS BE¬ 

TWEEN CONTEMPORARIES . . . .522 

I. AFTERMATHS OF UNSUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS . . . 522 

(а) EFFECTS ON THE FORTUNES OF THE ASSAULTED PARTY . . 522 

(б) EFFECTS ON THE FORTUNES OF THE ASSAILANT . . . 527 

II. AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS . . . 529 

(а) EFFECTS ON THE BODY SOCIAL ..... 529 

x. Symptoms in the Social Life of the Assailant . . . 529 

2. Symptoms in the Social Life of the Assaulted Party . . 530 

(a) 'One Man’s Meat is Another Man’s Poison’ . . 530 

( 0 ) 'One Thing Leads to Another’ .... 542 

(б) RESPONSES OF THE SOUL ..... 564 

x. Dehumanization ...... 564 

2. Zealotism and Hcrodianism ..... 580 

A Pair of Polar Standpoints ..... 580 
A Survey of Zealot and Hcrodian Reactions . . . 584 

A Meeting of Extremes ..... 610 
The Ineffectiveness of the Zcalot-Herodian Response . . 621 

3. Evangelism ....... 623 





ANNEXES 


CONTENTS 


ix 


VIII C, Annex: The Temporary Halt of the Western Civilization’s Frontier 

in North America at the Edge of the Great Plains . 630 
D, Annex: ‘The Monstrous Regiment of Women’ . . . 651 

E (1), Annex: Optical Illusions in Hesiod’s Vista of History . 664 

IX B (1), Annex : The Relativity of the Unit of Classification to the Object 

of Study . . . . . .667 

B (n) (a) 1, Annex I: The Role of Technological Competition in the 

Westernization of Russia . . . 674 

B (tl) (a) 1, Annex II: The Byzantine Inspiration of the Russian 
Political Ethos 

B (11) (a) 2, Annex I: The Conflict of Cultures in the Soul of Solomd 
B (n) (a) 2, Annex II: The Morea on the Eve of the Uprising of a.d 
1821 .... 

B (11) (a) 3, Annex I: The Peasant Majority of Mankind and th 
Agrarian Policy of the Soviet Union 
B (n) (a) 3, Annex II: Some Historical Clues to the Riddle of Paki 
stan's Future . 

B (11) (a) 4, Annex I: The Ineffectiveness of Panislamism 
B (11) (a) 4, Annex II: The Exploitation of Egypt by Mehmed 'Ali 
B (ll) (a) 5, Annex: Jewish History and the Millet Idea, by Jamc 
Parkes .... 

B (11) (a) 7, Annex: The Weltanschauung of Alexander Herzen 
B (ix) (e) 2, Annex: Sicilian Light on Roman Origins 
C (1), Annex: ‘Asia’ and 'Europe’: Facts and Fantasies 
D (11), Annex: The Mercenary Soldier’s Role as a Cultural Spearhead 

TABLE 


Barbarian War-Bands 


734-5 


zzs & S 

O & ~ O O' B O » - >0 O' 



VIII 

HEROIC AGES 

A. THE GENESIS OF A LIMES 

I N the two preceding Parts of this Study we have been concerned with 
universal states established by would-be saviours arising in the 
Dominant Minority 1 and with universal churches created by the Internal 
Proletariat . 1 Our subject in the present Part is the character of the so- 
called ‘heroic ages’ that arc episodes in the brief lives of barbarian 
war-bands. 

In another context 3 we have already acquainted ourselves with the 
conditions under which such ‘heroic ages’ arc generated. We have seen 
how, when a growing civilization breaks down through the deterioration 
of an attractively creative into an odiously dominant minority, one of the 
effects of this sinister change in the broken-down society’s leadership is 
the estrangement of its former proselytes in the once primitive societies 
round about, which the civilization in its growth stage was influenc¬ 
ing in divers degrees by the effect of its cultural radiation. The ex¬ 
proselytes’ attitude changes from an admiration expressing itself in 
mimesis to a hostility breaking out into warfare; and we have seen 4 that 
this warfare between a disintegrating civilization and its alienated ex¬ 
ternal proletariat may have one or other of two alternative outcomes. 

On a front on which the local terrain offers the aggressive civilization 
the possibility of advancing, at the militant barbarians’ expense, up to 
a ‘natural frontier' in the shape of some unnavigated sea or untraversed 
desert or unsurmounted mountain range, the barbarians, thus caught in 
a confined space and compelled to fight with their backs to the wall, may be 
decisively subjugated or annihilated. But, on fronts where the accidents 
of the terrain do not thus conspire with the prowess and policy of the 
civilization to bring a definitive victory within its grasp, geography is 
apt to militate in the barbarians’ favour; for, where the retreating bar¬ 
barian has open to him, in his rear, an unlimited field of manoeuvre, the 
shifting battle front is bound, sooner or later, to arrive at a line at which 
the aggressive civilization’s military superiority—however great this may 
have been initially, and however much it may have been increased 
through the dearly purchased experience of fratricidal warfare 5 —will be 
neutralized at last by the increasing handicap of the ever lengthening 
distance of the front from the aggressor’s base of operations. 

Along this line, when it is reached, a war of movement will change 
into a static war without having resulted in any military decision; and, 
since both belligerents will still be in the field, the Dominant Minority 
and the External Proletariat will find themselves at this stage in stationary 
positions in which they will be living side by side, as the former creative 

« Part vr. * Pm VII. » In V. v. 194-210. 

4 In V. v. 203-8. * Sec III. iii. 130-1. 

B 2698 . vm B 



2 HEROIC AGES 

minority and its prospective proselytes were living before the breakdown 
of the civilization set them at variance with one another. This semblance 
of a return to a happier previous situation is, however, superficial; for, 
though the military front has now become stationary', the psychological 
relation between the parties on either side of it has not reverted from a 
barren mutual hostility' to the previous creative interplay of attraction 
and mimesis, and there has been no restoration, cither, of the geographi¬ 
cal conditions under which this cultural intercourse once took place. In 
its growth stage the civilization gradually shaded off into a surrounding 
barbarism across a broad threshold which offered the outsider an easy 
access to an inviting vista within. The change from friendship to hostility 
transformed this conductive cultural threshold ( limen ) into an insulating 
military front; and the stabilization of this front, so far from mitigating its 
sharpness, turns out to have severely accentuated it. The fluid front of a 
running warfare is neither so definite nor so impassable a barrier as is 
the military frontier (limes) into which the fluid front crystallizes when the 
stage of stationary warfare is reached . 1 The contrast in configuration 
and character between an original limen -zone and an eventual /jww-line 
is the geographical expression of the conditions that generate an heroic 
age. 

An heroic age is, in fact, the social and psychological consequence of the 
crystallization of a limes, and our purpose in this Part is to trace this 
sequence of events by our customary empirical method of investigation. 
A necessary background to this undertaking is, of course, a survey of 
the barbarian war-bands that had breasted divers sectors of the limites of 
divers universal states during the history of Man in Process of Civiliza¬ 
tion up to date. A survey of this kind has already been attempted in a 
previous Part . 1 In that place a considerable muster of barbarian w r ar- 
bands has been reviewed, and, in passing, we have also there taken note 
of their distinctive achievements in the two fields of sectarian religion 
and epic poetry. In our present inquiry this foregoing survey can be 
drawn upon for purposes of illustration without having to be recapi¬ 
tulated. 

1 See V. v. 208. Ibn Khaldun define* the frontier of an empire as the line at which the 
imperial government’s authority peters out. ‘A dynasty is much more powerful at it* 
seat of government than it is at the extremities of its empire.’ He compares the loss of 
energy in the radiation of its power to the gradual dying away of rays of light streaming 
out from some central point, or of the circular ripples which spread over the surface 
of a piece of water when one strikes it ( Muqaddamdt , translated by de Slane, Baron McG. 
(Pans 1863-8, Imprimerie Imp6rialc, 3 vols.), vol. 1, p. 332). 

* In V. v. 210-337. 



B. A SOCIAL BARRAGE 

I F the cultural limen of a growing civilization is aptly described as the 
hospitable threshold of an ever open door, the military limes of a dis¬ 
integrating civilization can no less aptly be likened to a forbidding 
barrage astride a no longer open valley. A threshold is an unassuming 
piece of work, in which the human architect has been content to take 
advantage of a suitable surface and gradient that have been provided 
for him by Nature; a barrage is the imposing monument of a human 
skill and power that have set Nature at defiance; yet the magnificent 
barrage is as precarious as the humble threshold is secure; for the 
defiance of Nature is a tour de force on which Man cannot venture with 
impunity. 

‘The Arab-Muslim tradition relates that once upon a time there was 
to be seen in the Yaman a colossal work of hydraulic engineering known 
as the dam or dyke of Ma’rib, where the waters descending from the east¬ 
ern mountains of the Yaman collected in an immense reservoir and thence 
irrigated a great tract of country, giving life to an intensive system of 
cultivation and thereby supporting a dense population. After a time, the 
tradition goes on to relate, this dam broke, and in breaking devastated 
everything and cast the inhabitants of the country into a state of such 
dire distress that many tribes were compelled to emigrate.’• 

In the Islamic historical tradition this story—true or legendary—of 
the literal building and breaking of a barrage has served to account for 
the initial impulse behind an Arab Volkerwanderung that eventually 
swept out of the Arabian Peninsula with an impetus which carried it 
across the Tien Shan and the Pyrenees. Translated from this literal 
rendering into a simile, it becomes the story of every limes of every 
universal state. 

‘With the internal condition of the exterior barbarians the [sovereign 
of the universal state] has no concern; but the barrier or pale, whether 
of masonry or of armed men, obviously exerts a pressure of its own. It 
acts effectively as a dam against which weight accumulates, and so creates 
a point of pressure for those outside. In the end the barrier breaks, and 
with the inundation a new situation is created in which new tribal units 
are broken up, new individuals awake to self-assertion, and a new re¬ 
distribution of ownership takes place .’ 1 

Is this social catastrophe of the bursting of a military dam an inevi¬ 
table tragedy or an avoidable one ? If we arc to find the answer to this 
insistent question, we must analyse the social and psychological effects 
of the military barrage-builder's imperious interference with the 
natural course of relations between a civilization and its external prole¬ 
tariat. 

The first effect of erecting a barrage is, of course, to create a reservoir 

1 Caetani, L.: Studi di Storia Orientate, vol. i (Milan iqi r, Hoepli), p. 266. 

1 Tcggart, F. J.: The Procases of History (New Haven, Conn. 1918, Yale Univeraity 
Prew), pp. 97-98. 



4 


HEROIC AGES 

E stream above this artificial obstruction to the normal drainage down 
valley bottom; and this effect is inexorable even if we can imagine it 
to have been unintended and unforeseen. The erection of the barrage 
thus produces a striking differentiation in the physiography of the drain¬ 
age basin which was non-existent in the antecedent state of Nature. The 
intervention of the barrage now transforms the valley immediately 
above it from dry land into a lake with an area that is determined by the 
height of the barrage’s brim. Up to this level the now pent-up waters 
of the catchment basin will fill the upper portion of the valley and its 
lateral ravines, but the resultant reservoir, at its maximum, will have 
only a limited extent. It can never cover more than a fraction even of its 
own catchment basin, since it is beyond the builder’s power to raise a 
barrage, sited far down the valley, to the altitude of the head waters of 
the downflowing streams; and, even if these waters could have been 
dammed back right up to their head, there would still have remained a 
vast unsubmerged hinterland. This new and sharp distinction between 
a now submerged tract immediately above the barrage and a region at 
the back of beyond which is still left high and dry has already come to 
our notice in the social application of our hydrographic simile. 

In a previous context 1 we have observed the contrast between the 
revolutionary effect of a limes on the life of barbarians within point- 
blank range of it and the undisturbed torpidity of primitive peoples in a 
more distant hinterland. The Hypcrboracan Slavs continued placidly to 
lead their primitive life in the secluded Pripct Marshes throughout the 
span of two millennia which first saw the Achaean barbarians convulsed 
by their proximity to the European land-frontier of 'the thalassocracy of 
Minos’ in the basin of the Aegean Sea, and then saw the Teuton barbar¬ 
ians going through the same experience in their turn, some eighteen 
hundred years later, as a result of their proximity to the European land- 
frontier which the Roman Empire drew across the breadth of the 
Continent between the North Sea and the Black Sea . 2 The Achaeans and 
the Teutons were convulsed because they each happened to be en¬ 
gulfed in a reservoir created by the erection of a limes ; the Slavs remained 
undisturbed because, on both occasions, their physically water-logged 
habitat happened to be left culturally high and dry . 3 

1 In II. ii. 315-22. 

J The weakness of this frontier, owing to its inordinate length, has been pointed out 
in V. v. 591-5. _ 

3 This illuminating conception of the contrast between a social ‘reservoir’, whose 
barbarian denizens are decisively affected by the proximity of the limes that has dammed 
back the waters of life, and a more distant hinterland, whose barbarian denizens remain 
‘unregeneratc’ because the social influence of the limes is ineffective at that longer 
range, was first expounded by Owen Lattimore in Manchuria, Cradle of Conflict (New 
York 1932, Macmillan), pp. 36-42. The particular instance that gave Lattimore his in¬ 
sight into this generic feature in the human geography of limites was the classic case of 
the Great Wall of China, and the particular stage in the cycle of frontier history at 
which he first observed and recorded the phenomenon is one at which the 'reservoir 1 
is no longer the undesired menace that it is in the estimation of the /irnei-building 
Imperial Power, but has become the invaluable arcanum imperii of a barbarian successor- 
state of the empire for whose defence the limes was originally constructed. 

The barbarian war-lord from a ‘reservoir’ area who has succeeded in breaking through 
a limes and usurping Caesar’s throne finds himself beset by two anxieties: the conquered 
ex-subjects of the overthrown universal state may revolt against their parvenu bar¬ 
barian masters; and the 'unregeneratc’ barbarians in the more distant hinterland on the 


A SOCIAL BARRAGE 5 

Why arc the barbarians in the ‘reservoir’ area so disturbingly affected 
by the proximity of a military frontier which is at the same time a cultural 
barrage ? And what is the source of a subsequent access of energy which 
has enabled them invariably to break through the limes sooner or later as a 
matter of historical fact, whether this break-through is inevitable or is 
avoidable as a matter of theory? We may find answers to these questions 
if we follow out our simile in terms of its local Sinic geographical setting. 

Let us suppose the imaginary dam that symbolizes a limes in our 
simile to have been built astride some high valley in the region actually 
traversed by the Great Wall within the latter-day Chinese provinces of 
Shensi and Shansi. What is the ultimate source of that formidable body 
of water that we see pressing, in ever increasing volume, upon the dam’s 
up-stream face ? Though this water must all manifestly have come down¬ 
stream from above the dam on the last stage of its journey, the ultimate 
source of the greater part of it cannot lie in this direction; for the distance 
between the dam and the headwaters is not very great, and beyond the 
headwaters there stretches away the boundless Mongolian Plateau, with 
a dry steppe on its rim and a drier desert at its heart. If this parched 
region above the dam had been the sole source of the reservoir’s water- 
supply, the present head of water could never have accumulated; and we 
know, as a matter of fact, that the main source of supply is to be found, 
not above the dam, but below it: not on the Mongolian Plateau but in 
the Pacific Ocean. 

We also know that water cannot perform the salmon’s feat of forcing 
a passage upstream and vaulting over a weir; and this means that not one 
drop of the copious supply that has nevertheless succeeded in making its 
way out of the Pacific into the reservoir can have travelled over the 
ground in liquid form. In order to rise from sea level to the reservoir’s 
altitude this water must have been transformed by the heat of the Sun 
from liquid into vapour, been spirited by an east wind over plain and 
mountain in a volatile cloud, and then been condensed by cold air into 
rain falling into the catchment basin. Through thus first losing its 
liquidity and then regaining it, the migrant water deftly turns an adverse 

farther side of 'the reservoir' may be tempted by the ease and brilliance of the 'reser¬ 
voir' barbarians’ success to emulate their achievement by pouring through the breach 
at their heels and trying to snatch a share in the spoils of a derelict world. In these cir¬ 
cumstances the ruler of a barbarian successor-state in partibus civilium is confronted 
with the dual task of keeping 'unregenerate' barbarian competitors out and keeping 
restive civilized subjects down. For both purposes he relies on the military man-power 
of his comrades who have stayed behind in the reservoir instead of following him through 
the breach; and these intact reserves of an invading war-band are admirably fitted for 
performing both duties, since they have retained enough of their pristine barbarian 
military virtue to be more than a match for a civilized subject population, while they have 
acquired a sufficient tincture of the culture of their civilized neighbours and subjects 
to dc more than a match for their ‘unregenerate’ barbarian neighbours and rivals. 

In Inner Asian Frontiers of China (New York 1940, American Geographical Society), 
pp. 247-5 J, Lattimore has developed this concept of a 'reservoir' zone abutting on the 
outer face of a limes by showing that there is a corresponding zone in the rear of a limes 
in which a sub-society' of frontiersmen differentiates itself, under the influence of the 
immediate proximity of the barbarians, from the main body of the civilization which 
the limes both protects and confines. The frontiersmen of the marches and the bar¬ 
barians of the ’reservoir’ zone tend to approximate culturally to one another and 
eventually to fraternize against both the civilized population of the interior and the 
‘unregenerate’ barbarians in the outer darkness beyond the farther limits of the reservoir. 
(On this point, sec also the present Study, V. v. 459-80, and pp. 14-15, below). 


6 HEROIC AGES 

law of gravity to its own advantage; but, like human migrants who take 
advantage of an estranging sea by temporarily transforming themselves 
from landlubbers into seamen, the water has to pay a price for its 
ingeniously contrived passage. The cultural elements of their social 
heritage that the seafarers take with them on board ship prove to have 
suffered ‘a sea change’ by the time when they are landed in the emigrants’ 
new overseas place of settlement;' and the physical elements with which 
the flying water is impregnated suffer a comparable ‘sky change’ as a 
result of their journey. The tincture of sea salt is left behind in the process 
of evaporation which starts the flying water on its travels, and a tincture 
of rock salt is acquired when the streams begotten by the precipitated 
rain scour out the ravines in their descent into the reservoir. 

The water has accomplished its miraculous aerial voyage, but it is 
now a different brew from what it originally was; and this physical 
phenomenon is an accurate and illuminating simile of the psychic 
phenomenon of the filling of the reservoir of barbarian energy, dammed 
back by a military limes, with the water of life that psychologists call 
libido. The psychic energy that accumulates in the reservoir till its 
remorseless mounting pressure eventually bursts the barrage is derived 
only in an inconsiderable measure from the transfrontier barbarians’ 
own exiguous primitive social heritage; the bulk of it is drawn from the 
vast stores of the civilization which the barrage has been built to protect. 
This is the source of supply that swells the head of water in the reservoir 
to a mass that eventually proves too much for the barrage’s powers of 
resistance; and it is one of the ironies of History that the water which 
then pours through the breach should originally have been supplied by 
the very region which the cataclysm now devastates. Why has this 
water returned in a sudden destructive flood and not in a perennial 
fertilizing stream? The answer is to be found partly in the erection of 
the limes barrage, which has been an audacious human act of inter¬ 
ference with the ordinary course of Nature, and partly in the trans¬ 
formation which the migrant psychic energy has undergone in the 
course of its journey from the cultivated world within the limes to the 
barbarian reservoir beyond it—a transformation that has been Nature’s 
device for surmounting an obstacle which Man has placed in her path. 

Some such transformation of psychic energy is, no doubt, the price of 
every transfer of culture from one society to another; but the degree and 
the character of the transformation vary with the circumstances in which 
the transfer takes place. 2 The psychic transformation is at its minimum 
when the society that is the transmitting agent is a civilization in process 
of growth and the receiving reagent is a primitive society in a socially 
static Yin-state; it is at its maximum when both parties are civilizations 
and both are in disintegration. The case with which we are concerned in 
this Part manifestly lies somewhere between these two extremes; for a 
civilization which is transmitting psychic energy to its external proletariat 
is a civilization that is in process of disintegration ex hypothesi, while 
on the other hand the barbarians in ‘the reservoir’ beyond the limes are 
ex-primitives whose psychic resistance to the cultural radiation of the 
1 See II. ii. 84-100. * See pp. 481-629, below. 



A SOCIAL BARRAGE 7 

adjoining civilization is prompted, not by the positive motive of being 
up in arms in defence of an alternative civilization of their own, but only 
by the negative motive of hostility to an alien culture which, in its break¬ 
down, has lost the original savour that once made it attractive to the 
estranged barbarians’ proselyte ancestors. 

How is a transformation of psychic energy brought about in any of 
these diverse degrees ? The transforming process is the decomposition 
of a culture and its recomposition in a new pattern in which the constant 
component elements will have entered into new relations with one 
another, even if none of the original elements have been eliminated and 
no fresh elements have been added. In other contexts 1 we have com¬ 
pared the social radiation of culture to the physical radiation of light, 
and we shall be reverting to this simile and working out some of its impli¬ 
cations in the next Part after this, 2 in which we shall be concerned with 
encounters in which all parties are societies of the species here called 
'civilizations’. In this place we need merely remind ourselves of three 
radiational 'laws’. 

The first law is that an integral culture ray, like an integral light ray, 
is diffracted into a spectrum of its component elements in the course of 
penetrating a recalcitrant object—the degree of this diffraction being 
proportionate to the degree of the resistance that is encountered. 

The second law is that the diffraction of a culture may also occur, with¬ 
out any impact on an alien and recalcitrant body social, and indeed at a 
stage before the emission of the migrant ray by the emitting society, if, 
before the time of emission, this society has already broken down and 
begun to disintegrate. The cohesion and the diffraction of the component 
elements of a culture are, in fact, the respective symptoms of social health 
and growth and of social sickness and disintegration. A growing civiliza¬ 
tion can be defined as one in which the components of its culture—an 
economic clement, a political element, and a third which may be called 
the cultural element par excellence—are in harmony with one another; 
and, on the same principle, a disintegrating civilization can be defined 
as one in which these same elements have fallen into discord. 

Our third law is that the velocity and the penetrative power of an 
integral culture ray arc averages of the diverse velocities and penetra¬ 
tive powers which its economic, political, and cultural components 
respectively display when, as a result of diffraction, they each travel 
independently of the others. In isolation the economic ray is the swiftest 
and most penetrating, the political ray comes next to it in degree, while 
the cultural ray is surpassed by both its companions on both criteria. 
The speed and penetrative power of an isolated political ray, as well as 
those of an isolated economic ray, arc higher than those of an integral 
ray, whereas the speed and penetrative power of an isolated cultural 
ray are lower than those of an integral ray in which it is borne on the 
wings of its two sisters. This is one reason why the diffraction of a culture 
ray is a social disaster; for the social values of the three elements, as we 
find when we assess them, are exactly inverse to their capacities for 
covering distance and for making their way into foreign bodies. 

» In III. iii. 151-2 and V. v. 199-201. 1 On pp. 481-629, b<!ow. 



8 HEROIC AGES 

In the social intercourse between a disintegrating civilization and its 
alienated external proletariat across a military limes, the diffracted radia¬ 
tion of the civilization suffers a woeful impoverishment in the course of 
its arduous journey; for the respective states of the two parties conspire 
with the artificial barrier between them virtually to eliminate all rela¬ 
tions except those of war and trade, and, of these two, it is war that plays 
the predominant role. 1 

It is true that the passage of a barbarian personnel through the limes 
into the civilization’s domain, first as prisoners of war, then as hostages, 
next as mercenaries, and finally as conquerors, 2 is reflected on the econo¬ 
mic plane in a counter-flow of money—through the diverse channels of 
loot, military pay, and subsidies—out of the world within the limes into 
the barbarian ‘reservoir’ outside; and this money eventually flows back 
to its source in payment for goods purchased by its barbarian recipients 
from marchmen-mcrchants who venture out beyond the limes to peddle 
the wares of Civilization. There have been situations in w-hich a com¬ 
munity of transfronticr barbarians has come in this way to play an 
appreciable part in the domestic economy of the society on which they 
have been preying. A classic example is the apparent economic effect of 
the subsidies paid by the Constantinopolitan Roman Imperial Govern¬ 
ment to Attila {dominabatur , a.d. 434-53), the war-lord of a confederacy 
of Hun Nomad war-bands cantoned in the Hungarian Alfold. This remit¬ 
tance of money in specie from the Imperial Treasury at Constantinople 
to Attila’s ordu beyond the limes seems to have operated as a roundabout 
way of transferring purchasing power from the agrarian interests in the 
Empire, whose taxes provided the means of payment, to the manufactur¬ 
ing and commercial interests, which earned profits by making and 
marketing goods for purchase by the Huns with the money that they 
had exacted. 3 This commercial intercourse across a military limes is, 
however, apt to be discouraged and restricted by the imperial authorities 
because the manifest profitableness of the transfrontier trade to the 
traders on both sides is a plain and pointed indication that, in the social 
situation created by the erection of a limes, the marchmen just inside 
the barrage may acquire a common interest with the barbarians just 
outside it in the exploitation of the marchmen’s fellow citizens in the 
interior of the world which the limes is intended to protect; and, since a 
common interest might assert itself in concerted action between march- 
men and barbarians which would be a deadly danger to the fenced-in 
civilization, 

‘an imperial boundary . .. has in fact a double function: it serves not only 
to keep the outsiders from getting in but to prevent the insiders from 
getting out.. . It was necessary to restrict Chinese enterprise beyond the 
Great Wall . . . because Chinese who ventured too far beyond the Great 
Wall became a liability to the state; the business in which they engaged, 

1 See V. v. 202-3 ar| d 208-9. 

* See V. v. 459-60, and Chadwick, H. M.: The Heroic Age (Cambridge 1012, Uni¬ 
versity Pres*), pp. 445 ~ 6 - 

J An illuminating and entertaining analysis of this three-comcrcd economic relation¬ 
ship will be found in Thompson, E. A.: A History of Attila and the Hunt (Oxford 1048. 
Clarendon Press), pp. 184-97. 



A SOCIAL BARRAGE 9 

whether farming or trade, contributed more to the barbarian community 
than it did to the Chinese community. They passed out of the Chinese 
orbit . . . [and] Chinese who left the Chinese orbit and accommodated 
themselves to an un-Chinese economic and social order inevitably began 
cither to adhere to barbarian rulers or to practise barbarian forms of rule 
themselves—to the disadvantage of China.’ 1 

These considerations move an imperial government to restrict the 
«ow of trade between their own marchmcn and the transfrontier bar¬ 
barians; and such trade as there is tends to confine itself to an exchange 
of imperial specie in barbarian hands for two classes of imperial products: 
luxuries for the barbarian war-lords and their lieutenants and weapons 
both for them and for the rank-and-file of their followers. 1 The trade 
across the limes is, in fact, sickly as well as precarious, while border 
warfare flourishes perennially because Mars is master of the situation in 
which a disintegrating civilization and an alienated external proletariat 
face one another across a static military frontier. 

Under these sinister auspices, such selective mimesis of the Dominant 
Minority by the External Proletariat as does occur takes place on the 
barbarians’ initiative because the barbarians are politically free. 

'The needs and motives of the cisfrontier society and state must make 
concessions to those of the transfronticr peoples. The very act of drawing 
a boundary is an acknowledgement that the peoples excluded are not 
under control and cannot be ruled by command.’ 1 

The barbarians show their initiative by transmuting those culture 
elements that they do accept from the cisfrontier civilization. The lines 
which this transmutation follows are determined partly by an hostility 
to the transmitting civilization which makes the barbarian recipients of 
its cultural radiation disinclined to adopt what they borrow in a form 
that would stamp it as being a loan from this distasteful source; but this 
negative motive of aversion is reinforced by a positive incentive to turn 
a loan to practical account by adapting it to suit the needs of local 
barbarian life in ‘the reservoir’. 

The adaptations thus prompted by xenophobia and by utilitarianism 
go to different lengths in different fields of activity. The cultural products 
of a psychic energy flowing into a transfronticr barbarian society out of a 
civilization within the limes are modified in the process in some cases 
only to an extent that docs not wholly disguise their exotic origin, while 

* Lattimore, O.: Inner Asian Frontiers of China (New York 1940, American Geo¬ 
graphical Society), pp. 240 and 242. See also Thompson, op. cit., pp. 174-6, and the 
present Study, V. v. 471-6. 

1 Classic instances are the Roman weapons of the Imperial Age that have been found 
by Modem Western archaeologists in graves and hoards in the North European hinter¬ 
land of the Continental European Roman frontier, and the Greek luxury goods (some 
of them manufactured especially to suit the taste of this particular barbarian market) 
thae have been found in tombs of the Scythian Age in the Great Western Bay of the 
Eurasian Steppe. In the social structure of the Hun Power in the Hungarian Alffild in 
Attila’s day the importation of luxuiy goods was as important from the political point 
of view as the importation of arms from the military” for the effectiveness of Attila’s 
authority depended on the loyalty of his lieutenants, and his ability to retain their 
loyalty was dependent, in its turn, on his being able to put them in possession of 
luxuries which were symbols of wealth and honour in Nomad eyes (see Thompson, 
op. cit., especially pp. 170-1 and 176-7). 

J Lattimore, op. cit., p. 243. 



IO 


HEROIC AGES 
in other cases the transmutation goes so far as to be equivalent to an 
original act of creation through which the barbarians make the borrowed 
psychic raw materials completely their own spiritual property. Examples 
both of recognizable adaptations and of virtually new creations have 
been given already in a previous survey which need not be recapitulated. 
In this place we need only remind ourselves that the ‘reservoir’ barbar¬ 
ians arc apt to borrow the higher religion of an adjoining civilization in 
the form of a heresy 1 and the Caesarism of an adjoining universal state 
in the form of ‘an irresponsible type of kingship, resting not upon tribal 
or national law . .. but upon military prestige,’ ... in which ‘the king 
and his comitatns form the nucleus of the organism’, 2 while the barbar¬ 
ians’ capacity for original creation is displayed in heroic poetry 3 and in 
a pantheon that is the Olympian counterpart of the human comitatus of 
a barbarian war-lord. 4 

These creative achievements of a barbarian society beyond the pale 
of a disintegrating civilization are impressive; yet the cunningly re¬ 
minted metal still bears a tell-tale mark of its alien origin. The cultural 

« See V. v. 227-9, for the Arianism of the East Teuton barbarian convert* to Christi¬ 
anity beyond the Continental European frontier of the Roman Empire; p. 230 for the 
distinctive ecclesiastical practices of the Celtic barbarian converts to Christianity in 
the British Isles; p. 230 for the original presentation of Islam as a special revelation of the 
truths of Judaism and Christianity for the benefit of the Arab barbarians beyond the 

S 'rian frontier of the Roman Empire; p. 250 for the adoption of Manichaeism and 
estorian Christianity by the barbarians beyond the pale of the Syriac World in Central 
Asia; pp. 251-2 for the hold won by the heretical Shi'i version of Islam over the Berber, 
Iranian, and Arab barbarian neighbours of the 'Abbasid Caliphate in North-West Africa, 
in the fastnesses between the Elburz Range and the south coast of the Caspian Sea, 
and in HasS; p. 295 for the conversion of the Bosniak barbarians first to Bogomilism 
and then to Islam in preference either to Eastern Orthodox or to Western Catholic 
Christianity: p. 205 for the Bektashism of the Albanian barbarian converts to Islam on 
the fringe of the Ottoman Empire; and pp. 295-6 for the dissident Islamic Puritanism 
of the Wahhabi, Idrisi, Mahdist, and Sanusi Arab barbarians adjoining the frontiers 
of the Ottoman Empire in Arabia, the Eastern Sudan, and the hinterland of Cyrenaica. 

* Chadwick, op. cit., pp. 391 and 377; compare eundem: The Origin 0/ the English 
Nation (Cambridge 1007, University Press), pp. 295-300. See also the present Study, 
V. vi. 4, n. 4, and 228-34. 

J Sec V. v. 233 and 237-8 for the Homeric Epic of the Achaean barbarians beyond 
the Continental European frontier of ‘the thalassocracy of Minos’; p. 233 for the Saga 
of the Scandinavian barbarian neighbours of an infant Western Christendom; p. 233 
for the Epic of the Teuton barbarians beyond the Continental frontiers of the Roman 
Empire; pp. 233-4 and 265 (together with V. y. 596-606) for the Epic of the Aryas 
beyond the north-eastern frontiers of the Sumcric Empire of the Four Quarters and the 
north-western frontiers of the domain of the Indus Culture; p. 234 for the heroic poetry 
of the Arab barbarians beyond the Syrian frontier of the Roman Empire and the 
Jritji frontier of the Sasanian Empire; pp. 253-8 for the Greek Epic of the East Roman 
Akritai beyond the Anatolian frontier of the 'Abbasid Caliphate; pp. 250-60 for the 
French Epic of the Frank barbarians beyond the Pyrcnaean frontier of the Umayyad 
Caliphate in the Iberian Peninsula; pp. 288-9 for the Epic of the Russian barbarians 
beyond the north-west frontier of the Golden Horde; pp. 296-0 for the Greek and Serb 
heroic poetry of barbarians on the European fringes of the Ottoman Empire; p. 310 
for the heroic poetry of the Mongol barbarians beyond the Central Asian frontiers of 
the Ming and Manchu Empires; p. 325 for the heroic poetry of the Bosniak barbarians 
beyond the south-east frontier of the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy. 

4 See V. v. 230-3 for barbarian pantheons in general; p. 232 for the pantheons of the 
Achaeans, the Scandinavians, and the Aryas; p. 233 for the pantheon of the continental 
Teuton barbarians beyond the European frontiers of the Roman Empire; and pp. 
328-32 for the religious teaching of the prophets who arose, in the eighteenth and nine¬ 
teenth centuries of the Christian Era, among North American Indians whose traditional 
way of life was being destroyed by the impact of invaders from the European side of 
the Atlantic. These American Indian barbarian religions were noteworthy, as we have 
observed, in being gospels of non-violence in response to the aggression of the Indiana’ 
European assailants. 


A SOCIAL BARRAGE u 

products of the transfrontier barbarian arc scarred by that ‘schism in the 
soul’ which the malady of social disintegration brings with it as its 
counterpart and concomitant. 1 In the psychological revolution which 
coins Barbarism out of Primitive Human Nature, the traditional har¬ 
mony of Primitive Life in its static Yin-state is disrupted into a tension 
between the two poles of a more sophisticated individualism and a like¬ 
wise more sophisticated sense of unity. 

« Sec V. v. 376-368 and vi. x—x 68. 



C. THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE 
'The Wreckful Siege of Battering Days' 

T HE limen that lies open between the domain of a growing civilization 
and the homelands of its barbarian proselytes is like a gentle tree- 
clad slope on which the roots preserve the soil from erosion, so that the 
descending waters seep through gradually without scouring out gullies 
and pouring down them in torrents. This landscape is weather-proof, 
and it is consequently an insurance against a cataclysm so long as it is 
not convulsed through the civilization’s breaking down. By contrast, a 
static military frontier between a disintegrating civilization and its 
alienated external proletariat is intrinsically impermanent. The barrage 
is doomed to burst sooner or later. Premonitions of its ultimate fate are 
to be found in the avalanches of barbarian counter-invasion which are 
apt to descend on a civilization in the course of its history, before the 
establishment of its universal state, on fronts where its representatives 
have first extended its bounds by force at the adjoining barbarians’ 
expense and have then broken off their offensive without having arrived 
at a ‘natural’ frontier. 1 

The social barrage created by the establishment of a limes is subject 
to the same law of Nature as the physical barrage created by the con¬ 
struction of a dam. When Man’s obstruction of such a natural drainage 
system has brought into existence two artificially separated bodies of 
water at two different levels, this human interference with Nature 
provokes on Nature’s side an impulse to correct it. The water piled up 
above the dam seeks to regain a common level with the water below the 
barrier, and the degree of the consequent pressure is determined by the 
quotient of the difference in height between the two levels and the mass 
of the water held at the higher level of the two. In the structure of a 
physical dam the engineer introduces safety-valves in the form of sluices 
which can be opened, to whatever the necessary extent may be, whenever 
the pressure of the head of water in the reservoir threatens to exceed 
the limits of the dam’s capacity to resist it; and this obvious device for 
safeguarding the dam against catastrophe by providing for a regulated 
release of the pent-up waters is not overlooked by the political engineers 
of a military limes, as we shall see. In this case, however, the attempted 
remedy merely precipitates the cataclysm that it is designed to forestall, 
for the social and psychological materials of which a limes is constructed 
are so frail and friable that, if once this sandstone masonry is breached, 
the outpouring waters of barbarian energy quickly sweep the whole 
structure away. In the maintenance of a social barrage the relief of 
pressure by a regulated release of water is, in fact, impracticable; there 
can be no discharge from the reservoir without the barrage being 
destroyed; and, since, from the moment when the barrage is erected, the 
head of water above it keeps on accumulating inexorably ex hypothesi 
through the transfer of energy from the civilization below the barrage 
1 For examples of such barbarian avalanches, see V. v. 205. n. 3. 


THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE 13 
and its transformation into barbarian energy in the reservoir above, 
sooner or later the time is bound to come when breaking-point will have 
been reached, and at that juncture a catastrophe will inevitably occur. 

The day of doom may be postponed by attempts to strengthen the 
structure of the barrage as an alternative to the impracticable expedient 
of piercing it with sluices; but this cruder countermeasure can at best 
put off the evil day without being equal to averting it; for, as we shall 
also see, each arithmetical increase in the pressure of transferred and 
transformed energy upon the limes increases the cost of proportionately 
reinforcing the barrage by a geometrical progression. In this race be¬ 
tween attack and defence, the attack cannot fail to win in the long run; 
and thus, on a static limes, Time works inexorably on the barbarian’s 
side, as we have observed already by anticipation. 1 This ‘law’ also 
signifies, however, that it does take time for barbarians barred out by a 
limes to achieve their inevitable eventual break-through into the long- 
coveted domain of a disintegrating civilization which looks to them like 
an earthly paradise so long as ‘distance lends enchantment to the view’. 2 
‘A long period of “education”, in which a semi-civilized people has been 
profoundly affected from without by the influence of a civilized people,’ 3 
is the necessary prelude 4 to the 'heroic age’ in which the barbarians have 
their fling when a sagging and tottering limes at last collapses. 

The Impracticability of a Policy of Non-Intercourse 

Thus the erection of a limes sets in motion a play of social forces 
which is bound to end disastrously for the builders; and, for them, the 
only way of avoiding ultimate disaster would be to preclude this fatal 
course of events by insulating completely from one another the two in¬ 
compatible societies whose respective domains the limes artificially 
demarcates. A policy of non-intercourse is, indeed, the counsel of per¬ 
fection in the mind of any imperial government that is burdened with 
the responsibility for keeping a limes in being. In practice, however, an 
arbitrarily drawn military barrier can never perfectly or permanently 
produce the effect of a ‘natural’ frontier provided by some untraversed 

' In V. v. 209. * Campbell, Thomas: Pleasures 0} Hope, Part I, I. 7. 

* Chadwick, The Heroic Age, p. 458. 

* Apropos of the Serb heroic age at the climax of an Orthodox Christian Time of 
Troubles, after the collapse of the Bulgarian and East Roman Empires and before the 
imposition of a Pax Ottomanica, Chadwick points out in op. tit., on p. 448, that, ‘here 
again .... as in the Teutonic and Cumbrian heroic ages, we have the case of a semi- 
civilized and "juvenile” nation exposed fora long period to the influence of a civilized 
but decaying empire'. Chadwick has, in fact, established an historical ‘law’ to the effect 
that the precipitation of an heroic age is normally the cumulative effect of the radiation 
of a decaying civilization into a primitive society over a period of time that is to be mea¬ 
sured, not in years, but in generations. Since the publication of Chadwick’s The Heroic 
Age in a.d. 1912 it had, however, been demonstrated by Hitler that a diabolically 1 per¬ 
verse process of mis-education can artificially produce the same psychological^ effect in 
a community that has advanced as far alone the path of civilization as pre-Nazi Ger¬ 
many, and that, under these artificial conditions, the process of barbanzation can be 
so greatly speeded up as to be ‘telescoped’ into the span of a single generation. The 
deliberate uprooting of the boys and youths of Nazi Germany from the habit, expecta¬ 
tion, and love of a settled life by the systematic application of Modern Western methods 
of mass-suggestion had evoked a caricature of an heroic age by a process of ‘speeding-up’ 
that was a counterpart, on the psychological plane, of the visual effect produced by 
speeding up the display of a film. 


i 4 HEROIC AGES 

sea or desert or mountain-range, because the wardens of the limes find 
themselves unable effectively to control either the transfrontier barbar¬ 
ians or the cisfrontier marchmcn. 

‘The very fact that the "barbarians” of the excluded territory are al¬ 
ways described as aggressive raiders, attackers and invaders shows that 
geographical limits that appear "natural” and inevitable to one society 
are not necessarily regarded as geographical obstacles by other societies, 
which may in fact treat them as merely political obstacles.’ 1 

And, conversely, 

‘While the general policy of the [universal] state seeks to establish the 
limit at which its interests can remain centripetal, and to prevent exces¬ 
sive expansion from passing over into centrifugal dispersion, this policy 
is resisted and evaded by the particular interests of traders, would-be 
colonisers, ambitious political and military careerists, and so forth, who 
see opportunities for themselves across the border. Thus there grows up 
a nexus of border interests which resents and works against the central 
interest.’ 2 

A striking illustration of this tendency among the marchmcn of a 
universal state to make common cause with the barbarians beyond the 
pale is afforded by the history of the relations between the Roman 
Empire and the Hun Eurasian Nomads who broke out of the heart of the 
Eurasian Steppe towards the end of the third quarter of the fourth 
century of the Christian Era and established themselves on the Hungarian 
Alfold. 3 Though the Huns were unusually ferocious barbarians from the 
back of beyond, and though their ascendancy along the European limes 
of the Roman Empire was ephemeral, a record of three notable cases of 
fraternization had survived among the fragmentary remnants of the 
contemporary accounts of this brief episode. Attila’s secretary of state 
was a Pannonian subject of the Roman Empire named Orestes, whose 
son Romulus Augustulus was to make his name by the facile achieve¬ 
ment of being the last Roman Emperor in the West. 4 The renegade 
Greek business man from Viminacium whom the Greek historian and 
Roman diplomatist Priscus encountered in Attila’s ordu on the Alfold 
in a.d. 449 has already come to our noticed This adventurous Greek was 
not even a marchman by birth. He had migrated to Viminacium, on the 
Danubian limes of the Empire, from the interior of the Hellenic World 
before being deported beyond the pale when his adopted city was cap¬ 
tured by the Huns in a.d. 441. The third member of the trio is ‘Eustace, 
a merchant of Apamea’, who, ‘about the year a.d. 484, long after Attila 
was dead, is found accompanying a band of Hun marauders in the role 
of their chief adviser on a plundering expedition against Persia’. 6 

The Hun Power in Europe came and went too quickly for this fraterni- 

1 Lattimorc, Inner Asian Frontiers of China, p. 239. 1 Ibid., pp. 243-4. 

J The occupation of the Alfdld by the Western Huns is dated tentatively on the 
morrow of the Battle of Adrianople (eommssum a.d. 378) by Thompson, E. A.: A His¬ 
tory of Attila and the Huns (Oxford 1948, Clarendon rress), p. 26. 

4 ‘Orestes Pannonius, qui eo tempore quando Attila ad Italiam venit se illi iunxit, 
et eius notarius factus fuerat’ (Anonymus Valesianus, chap. 38, quoted by Thompson, 
op. cit., p. 163). _ J In V. v. 473-4. 

6 Thompson, op. cit., p. 175, quoting Zachariah of Mytilene, p. 152. 



THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE 15 
zation between the aggressive barbarians and the renegade children of 
the civilization that was their victim to produce any lasting historical 
effect. It is, however, significant that it should have gone to such lengths 
in so short a time between parties which, at their first encounter, had 
been poles apart in their respective ways of life; and, in cases in which 
the barbarian Power with whom the renegades had thrown in their lot 
had been built on more durable foundations, this unholy alliance had 
sometimes begotten noteworthy political offspring. The residuary con¬ 
tinental European successor-state of the Roman Empire in the West 
was born of a partnership between Frankish laeti and Gallic bishops and 
landlords who were the local representatives of the Roman Senatorial 
Order. The Manchu Empire, which provided the main body of the Far 
Eastern Society with a second instalment of its universal state, was born 
of a similar partnership between Manchu transfrontier barbarians and 
Chinese marchmcn settled beyond the Great Wall but within the Willow 
Palisade. 1 

Thus the existence of a limes always in practice generates social inter¬ 
course—and this in both directions—between the parties whom the 
barrier is designed to insulate from one another. In this intercourse, as 
we have seen,* war predominates over trade; and war is a relation which 
is technologically educative in spite of being psychologically estranging. 
A universal state cannot hold the transfrontier barbarians in check along 
the line of the times without fighting them, and it cannot fight them 
without involuntarily training them in its own superior way of doing this 
sinister work. The art of war radiates more rapidly and penetratingly 
than any other branch of technique; in the outflow of exports, weapons 
are apt to arrive earlier and make their way farther afield than non- 
lcthal tools; 1 and the imported weapons of an adjoining civilization are 
copied by barbarian artificers with an adroitness that is proportionate 
to the eagerness of the demand in the local barbarian market. 

The Eurasian Nomad barbarians ‘could not arm themselves at all for 
purposes of large-scale offensive operations without the assistance of 
imported weapons. . . . Even the Mongols of the twelfth century—a 
military' nation if ever there was one—had to import their weapons, 
chiefly from China and Khurasan.’ 4 On the North-West Frontier of the 
British Indian Empire from about a.d. 1890 onwards ‘the influx of rifles 
and ammunition into tribal territory . .. completely changed the nature 
of border warfare’ ; s and, while the transfrontier Pathans’ and BalQchis’ 
earliest source of supply of up-to-date Western small-arms was system¬ 
atic robbery from the British Indian troops on the other side of the line, 
‘there would ... have been small cause for apprehension, had it not been 
for the enormous growth of the arms traffic in the Persian Gulf, which, 
both at Bushirc and [at] Muscat, was at first in the hands of British 

1 Sec VI. vii. 128-9 arxi 332. * On pp. 8-9. above. 

* ‘We may refer in particular to the Roman helmets and the large number of Roman 
swords and shield-bosses found in deposits on the cast side of the province of Slcsvig— 
a district remote from the Roman frontiers’ (Chadwick, op. cit., np. 444 ~ 5 )- 

4 Thompson, E. A.: A History o] Attila and the Hum (Oxford 1948, Clarendon Press), 
pp. 173 and 172. ... 

* Davies, C.C.: The Problem of the North-West Frontier, 1S90-X90S (Cambndge 
1932, University Press), p. 176. 



16 HEROIC AGES 

traders’ 1 —a striking example of the tendency for the private interests of 
the empire’s subjects in doing business with the transfrontier barbarians 
to militate against the public interest of the imperial government in 
keeping the barbarians at bay. ‘When these methods failed, there still 
remained the Kohat rifle factory, owned by Pathans, and situated in the 
strip of independent territory which separates Peshawar from Kohat.’ 2 
‘The possession of arms of precision has also produced a change in 
Pathan tactics, for, with the exception of certain ghSssi rushes, there has 
been a tendency for the recklessness which characterized the earlier 
struggles to disappear.’ 5 


The Barbarians' Exploitation of their Civilized Neighbours' Weapons 

The transfronticr barbarian is not, however, content simply to practise 
the superior tactics which he has learnt from an adjoining civilization 
without proceeding to adapt them to the local terrain. Ex hypothesise al¬ 
ready has the initial advantage of being at home in a theatre of military 
operations in which his opponent is a stranger, since the limes is situated 
in barbarian territory which the civili2ation has occupied, up to this line, 
by force of arms in an aggressive previous chapter of its history. When 
the barbarian combines his hereditary mastery of the local situation with 
a creative adaptation of borrowed weapons and tactics, superior to his 
own, to suit the local conditions of warfare, he becomes formidable 
indeed. His best opportunities for putting his civilized adversary at this 
military disadvantage arise where the local terrain displays some strongly 
pronounced physical characteristic which is unfamiliar and adverse to 
the civilized belligerent and yet at the same time lends itself to the 
employment, with adroit modifications, of weapons and tactics that have 
been borrowed from him by his barbarian antagonist. 

For example, on the maritime frontiers of the Carolingian Empire and 
the Kingdom of Wessex the Scandinavian pirates turned to such good 
account a technique of shipbuilding and seamanship which they had 
acquired, perhaps, from the Frisian maritime marchmen of a nascent 
Western Christendom that they captured the command of the sea and, 
with it, the initiative in the offensive warfare which they proceeded to 
wage along the coasts and up the rivers of the Western Christian 
countries that were their victims. 4 When, in pushing up the rivers of 
the British Isles and France, the Scandinavian raiders reached the limit 
beyond which they could not make their way farther by water even in 
their shallow and slender dragon-ships, they exchanged one borrowed 
weapon for another and continued their aggressive campaign on horse¬ 
back instead of on ship-board, since the invaded countries were stocked 
with horses for them to seize and they had mastered the Frankish art 5 
of cavalry-fighting as well as the Frisian art of navigation. The Cossack 
barbarians proved equally ubiquitous and elusive in their attacks on the 
steppe-empire of the Golden Horde when these river-pirates, lurking on 
islands among cataracts where the Nomad was out of his element, added 

1 Davie*, op. cit., p. 177. * Ibid. 

5 Ibid., p. 176. 4 See II. ii. 344-6. 

* Frankish by adoption, Sarmatian by origin (see IV. iv. 439-45). 



THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE 17 
a second string to their bow by also mastering the Tatar art of horse¬ 
manship. 1 Conversely the Saka Nomad barbarian invaders of an Hellenic 
empire in India in the second and the last century b.c. added a second 
string to their bow by exchanging the saddle for the deck in order to 
take advantage of the waterways offered to an invader by the River Indus 
and its tributaries. 2 

The militarily decisive employment of the horse by sedentary bar¬ 
barians beyond the frontier of a Nomad steppe-empire had had counter¬ 
parts in cases of the more usual type in which the Nomad had been the 
representative of Barbarism and the husbandman the representative of 
Civilization. The original domestication of the horse appears to have 
been achieved by Aryan Nomad barbarians from the Transcaspian 
fringe of the Great Eurasian Steppe who mounted the Iranian Plateau 
and broke across it, in the eighteenth or the seventeenth century B.c., 3 
into the domain of an Empire of Sumer and Akkad that had been re¬ 
constituted by Hammurabi. At this tempestuous first entry of the war- 
horse upon the stage of History the new-fangled animate weapon makes 
its appearance, not as a cavalryman’s mount, but as a charioteer’s 
tractor; and the two-wheeled battle-car, drawn by a pair of draught- 
animals under the yoke, is shown by the archaeological evidence to have 
been a weapon which the Aryan Nomad barbarians had borrowed from 
the Sumeric Society against which these invaders eventually employed 
it with such deadly effect. 

‘In the . . . Early Dynastic reliefs from Ur and Kafajah, and on the 
famous inlaid “standard” from the royal tombs of Ur, . . . ass-drawn 
chariots are shown in great detail, with solid wheels made of two half¬ 
discs dowelled together against the hub ... It looks ... as if the battle- 
car was an invention of Early Dynastic Sumer and that its use was adopted, 
with other technological devices such as metallurgy and the shaft-hole 
axe . . ., by the Indo-Europeans on the northerly fringes of the Kingdom 
of Sumer and Akkad soon after 2000 B.C., [and was] given added 
speed and lightness by the use of horses and the invention of the spoked 
wheel.’ 4 


On the Syrian limes of the Roman Empire the ground had been prepared 
for the titanic irruption of the transfronticr Arab Nomad barbarians in 
the seventh century of the Christian Era by the recent introduction of 
the war-horse into the Arabian Peninsula some sixteen or seventeen 
centuries after its arrival in the adjoining ‘Fertile Crescent’ from its place 
of origin somewhere in Central Asia.* The less dramatic, yet also 
momentous, irruption of the Berber Nomad barbarians across the 
Empire’s North-West African limes in the preceding century had been a 
similar consequence of the recent introduction of the camel from Arabia 
into North Africa. 6 

« Sec II. ii. 154-7 “nd V. v. 282-4. 

* See Tarn, W.W.: The Greeks in Bactria and India (Cambridge 1938, University 
Press), pp. 320, 322, and 328-30. 

* Sec the Note on Chronology in vol. x, pp. 167-212. below. 


J bee the Note on Chronology in vol. x, pp. 107-212. below. 

* Piggott, Stuart: Prehistoric India (London 1050, Pelican), pp. 274 and 276. 
s i.e. at about the beginning of the Christian Era, according to Cactani, L.: i 
Storia Orientate, vol. i (Milan 1911, Hoepli), p. 346. 

4 See Gautier, E.F.: Lei SiMes Obseurs du Maghreb (Paris 1927, Payot), pp. 165-79- 


Studi di 





iS HEROIC AGES 

The most dramatic case in the history of the war-horse in which this 
weapon had been turned by a barbarian against the civilization from 
which he had acquired it was to be found in the New World, where the 
horse had been unknown till it had been imported by post-Columbian 
Western Christian intruders from the European side of the Atlantic. 
Owing to this lack of a domesticated animal which, in the Old World, 
had been the making of the Nomad stock-breeder’s way of life, the 
Great Plains of the Mississippi Basin, 1 * which would have been a herds¬ 
man’s paradise, had remained the hunting-grounds of tribes who 
followed their game laboriously on foot over these great open spaces. 
The belated advent of the horse in this ideal horse-country had effects on 
the life of the immigrant and the life of the native which, while in both 
cases revolutionary, were different in every other respect. The introduc¬ 
tion of the horse on to the plains of Texas, Venezuela, and Argentina 
made Nomad stock-breeders out of the descendants of 150 generations 
of husbandmen; 1 the same potent technological revolution made mobile 
mounted war-bands out of the Indian hunting-tribes on the Great Plains 
of North America beyond the northern frontier of the Spanish vice¬ 
royalty of New Spain 3 and beyond the western frontier of the English 
colonies that eventually became the United States. In this case the 
borrowed weapon, mated with a local terrain that was ideal for its em¬ 
ployment, did not give the transfrontier barbarian the ultimate victory 
against an adversary equipped with the far more potent weapons of 
Industrialism; but it did enable him to postpone the day of his final 
discomfiture and to inflict one signal disaster on the aggressive civiliza¬ 
tion in the last chapter of this North American frontier’s history. 4 5 

While the nineteenth century of the Christian Era saw the prairie 
Indian of North America turn one of the European intruder’s weapons 
against its original owner by disputing the possession of the Plains with 
the aid of the horse, the eighteenth century had already seen the forest 
Indian turn the European musket to account in a new-fangled warfare 
of sniping and ambuscades which, with the screening forest as the 
Indian sharp-shooter’s confederate, had proved more than a match for 
the tactics of the Potsdam parade ground, whose close formation, precise 
evolutions, and steady volleys—designed for polite hostilities on Euro¬ 
pean battle-fields—courted destruction when unimaginatively employed 
against adversaries who had mated the European musket with the 
American forest. s In days before the invention of fire-arms, correspond- 


1 Sec Webb, W.P.: The Great Plaint (New York 1031, Ginn). 

* See II. i. 25J-6. 

J The enterprisingness of the nineteenth-century Apache* and Comanche* in mount¬ 
ing on horse-back is in piquant contrast to the conservatism of their Spanish antagonists, 
whom the turn of the century found still using the lance and shield and even the bow- 
ond-arrows—apart from an elite armed with fire-locks of a sixteenth-century pattern 
(see III. iii. 136, n. 1). 

4 The history of the Indian frontier of the United States is examined further on 
pp. 630-50, below. 

5 In thus turning to account the military potentialities of the North American forest 
the Indians merely postponed the date of their extermination at the hands of their 
assailants from beyond the Atlantic. If, before the Europeans' advent, they had managed 
to turn the forest’s economic potentialities to account by cutting it down and replacing 
it by a populous agricultural country-side, they might not merely have postponed their 



THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE 19 
ing adaptations of the current weapons of an aggressive civilization to 
the opportunities offered by forest warfare had enabled the barbarian 
denizens of the Russian forests to bend, without breaking, before the 
blast of repeated explosions of Nomad aggression from the Eurasian 
Steppe, and to survive the ephemeral dominions of successive Nomad 
lords of the Steppe’s Great Western Bay, from the Royal Scythians to 
the Golden Horde. 1 A similar response to a comparable challenge had 
enabled the barbarian denizens of the Transrhenanc forests of Northern 
Europe to save a still-forest-clad Germany from the Roman conquest that 
had overtaken an already partially cleared and cultivated Gaul by inflict¬ 
ing on the Romans a decisively deterrent disaster in the Teutoburger- 
wald in a.d. 9. 


The Barbarians' Exploitation of their Native Terrain 

The line along which the military frontier between the Roman Empire 
and the Continental North European Barbarians consequently came to 
rest for the next four centuries carries its own explanation on the face of 
it in terms of terrain and tactics. It was the line beyond which a forest 
that had reigned here since the end of the latest bout of glaciation was 
still decisively preponderant over the works of Homo Agricola which had 
opened the way for the march of the Roman legions from the Mediter¬ 
ranean up to the Rhine and the Danube. This line, however, also 
happened, as we have observed,* to be the longest alincment that could 
have been found for a Roman military frontier across Continental Europe 
by a surveyor perversely seeking to draw the frontier out to the maximum 
possible length; and, even if the trade had been drawn, not from the 
mouth of the Rhine to the burdensomely distant mouth of the Danube, 
but along the shortest line between the Baltic and the Black Sea or 
between the North Sea and the Adriatic, we may surmise that, in the 
long run, this hypothetical shortest practicable Roman times in Con¬ 
tinental Europe would have suffered the fate that actually overtook the 
long-drawn-out historic line between Batavia and the Dobruja; for, 
while it is evident that the burden of maintaining a limes varies in weight 
in proportion to the frontier’s length, the fatal weakness of a times is not 
its length but its stationariness and rigidity, and this weakness, being 
intrinsic, is irremediable. 

On the local anti-barbarian frontiers of the still surviving parochial 
states of a Westernizing World which, at the time of writing, embraced 
all but a fraction of the total habitable and traversable surface of the 
planet, two of the recalcitrant barbarian’s faithful non-human allies had 
already been outmanoeuvred by a Modern Western industrial technique. 
The Forest had long since fallen a victim to cold steel, while the Steppe, 
from its parkland fringe to its desert heart, had been penetrated by the 
petrol-driven internal combustion engine of the aeroplane and the 
terrestrial motor vehicle travelling on the treads of a revolving belt over 


doom but have averted it at the price of losing their political independence (sec IT. 
ii. 277-8). A thickly settled Central American and Andean peasantry did survive a 
Spanish conquest. 

* See V. v. 281-9. In v - v - 591 - 5 - 



20 


HEROIC AGES 


terrain where wheels could no longer convey it. The barbarian’s 
mountain ally, however, had proved a harder nut to crack, and the 
nineteenth-century Russian feat of taming the Caucasus and twentieth- 
century French feat of taming the Atlas and the Rif had not yet been 
emulated by any corresponding domestication of either the western or 
the eastern rim of the Iranian Plateau. At this date the serried tiers of 
the Zagros Range, astride a theoretical Perso-Turkish and Perso-'Iraqi 
frontier, were still serving as fastnesses for wild Kurds, Lurs, Bakhti- 

S rls, and the motley wild highlanders of Fars, while the Sulayman 
nge and its ramifications were performing the same service for wild 
Pathans and Baluchis who were hardly conscious of a theoretical Indo- 
Afghan frontier that had been drawn across the map of their homelands 
in a.d. 1893 and had been inherited in a.d. 1947 from a British Indian 
Empire by a Pakistan that was one of its three successor-states. 

This highlander rear-guard of a Barbarism which, in a ubiquitously 
Westernizing World, was now fighting with its back to the same advanc¬ 
ing wall that it was confronting, had been displaying, in its latest forlorn 
hopes, an impressive ingenuity in turning to its own advantage, on its 
own terrain , some of the latter-day devices of an industrial Western 
military technique. By this tour de force the Rif I highlanders astride the 
theoretical boundary between the Spanish and French zones of Morocco 
had inflicted on the Spaniards at Anwal in the summer of a.d. 1921 a 
disaster 1 comparable to the annihilation of Varus’s three legions by the 
Cherusci and their neighbours in the Teutoburgerwald in a . d . 9, and 
had left their mark on History by making the Romanesque structure of 
French Power in North-West Africa rock on its foundations in the 
summer of a.d. 1925. By the same sleight of hand the Mahsuds of 
Waziristan had baffled repeated British attempts to subdue them during 
the ninety-eight years that had elapsed between a.d. 1849, when the 
British had inherited this anti-barbarian frontier from the Sikhs as a 
penalty for having annexed the Sikh Raj, and a . d . 1947, when the 
British had disencumbered themselves of a still unsolved Indian North- 
West Frontier problem by bequeathing this unwelcome legacy to a fully 
self-governing Dominion of Pakistan. 

In the trial of strength in a.d. 1925 between the Rlfi barbarian war¬ 
lord ‘Abd-al-Karim and the great French soldier and administrator 
Marshal Lyautey, 


‘the prospective scene of operations, like the adjoining parts of the 
Spanish Zone, was an arid treeless country, covered with a thorny under¬ 
growth, broken up by ravines, and cursed with a scanty water-supply; 
and this was almost an ideal terrain for the Rlfi forces, who were thoroughly 
at home in their native environment and at the same time had adopted 
such elements in the Western art of war as could be employed there to 
good purpose. Every Rlfi fighting-man was an adept at taking cover, and, 
notwithstanding the brokenness of the country, he was disconcertingly 
mobile, since he lived in the open and carried no impedimenta except a 
handful of food, in the hood of his cloak, and his rifle and ammunition. 
With rifles, machine-guns, and small-arms ammunition the Rifis had 
1 For details see Toynbee, A.J.: Survey of International Affairs, 1025, vol i (London 
1927, Milford), pp. 115-16. 



THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE 21 

supplied themselves abundantly at the Spaniards’ expense; and, although 
the captured Spanish artillery was clumsily served and there was no air 
force on the Rif! side, these were luxuries and not necessities under the 
local conditions. On the other hand the Rifi High Command had not only 
captured but [had] learnt to utilise field telephones, and by means of 
these they were able to keep in touch with their widely scattered and con¬ 
stantly moving units, and to execute concerted manoeuvres over as wide 
a field as their opponents. They appear to have established district depots 
of rifles and ammunition, to which the tribesmen could be called up at 
short notice, fitted out, and then dispatched to any point where they 
were needed. The bulk of their forces was extremely fluid—the men being 
perpetually called up in relays and perpetually released (as far as the 
course of the campaign allowed) to work in the fields. Every tribe, how¬ 
ever, appears to have been required to supply a permanent contingent, 
and the tribal levies were stiffened by a small standing army of regulars* 
(mostly drawn from 'Abd-al-Karim’s own tribe, the Banu Wuryaghal of 
Ajdir) who were uniformly trained and equipped and were in receipt of 
pay and rations—in consideration of which they had to hand over their 
booty to the Government. 

‘The Rifi tactics (which were directed by *Abd-al-KarIm’s brother, 
Mahammad, the mining engineer, as Commander-in-Chief) were to send 
fonvard a screen of irregulars who filtered through the enemy’s line and 
raised the tribes in his rear—if necessary by coercion. By this means the 
Rifi army grew like a snowball as it advanced, each tribe whose territory 
became the scene of fighting being called out eti masse. The tendency 
towards desultoriness and incoherence, which was to be looked for in an 
army recruited in this way, was guarded against by placing all the tribal 
contingents under the command of regulars, but the main body of the 
regular troops was carefully husbanded and kept in reserve. Advancing 
behind the screen of tribesmen they dug themselves in, provided a sup¬ 
port upon which the skirmishers could fall back, and resisted enemy 
counter-attacks in hand-to-hand fighting,* with a tenacity which reminded 
their French adversaries of European warfare.’ 3 

Through this skilful adaptation of tactics to terrain the Rifi offensive 
in the summer of a.d. 1925 came within an ace of cutting the corridor, 
traversed by a railway, which linked the effectively occupied part of the 
French Zone of Morocco, along the Atlantic seaboard, with the main 
body of French North-West Africa in Algeria and Tunisia, and which 
thereby insulated the still unsubdued Rifis astride the boundary between 
the French and Spanish zones of Morocco from the likewise still un¬ 
subdued tache de Taza , immediately south of the French corridor, and 
from the much larger unsubdued area, farther south again, in the fast¬ 
nesses of the Atlas. The threat to the corridor at the crisis of the cam¬ 
paign may be said, without exaggeration, to have put in jeopardy the 

' Estimated at from 6,000 to 10,000 men (Foreign Affairs of New York, January 
1926). 

* 'Marshal Lyautcy has found himself in the presence, not indeed of highly scientific 
armies, but of a remarkable infantry, which ia the equal of any infantry in the World in 
courage, character ar.d marksmanship’ (M. Painlevd in the French Chamber, 9th July, 
1925). For accounts of the military organization and tactics of the Rifi forces, tee The 
Times, 19th May, 1925; Le Temps , 2xst and 23rd May, and 22nd June; three articles 
by M. Reginald Kann in Le Temps, 7th. 9th, and 13th August; and an article by Signor 
Luciano Magrini in the Corriere della Sera, 30th August. 

3 Toynbee, Survey, 1923, vol. i, pp. 135-6. 



22 


HEROIC AGES 
whole French position in the Maghrib; for if the Rif is had broken 
through they might have raised the Atlas tribes, and such an extension of 
hostilities would have immeasurably increased the strain on French 
military resources. 

Interests of comparable magnitude were at stake for the British Raj 
in India in the trial of strength between the Mahsud barbarians and the 
armed forces of the British Indian Empire in the Waziristan campaign of 
a.d. 1919-20; for, if in this contest the Mahsuds had got the better of 
the Great Power whom they were audaciously defying, the conflagration 
might have spread through the length and breadth of the unsubdued 
country astride the theoretical Indo-Afghan frontier. In this campaign 
likewise the barbarian belligerent’s strength lay in his skilful adaptation 
of Modem Western arms and tactics to a terrain that was unpropitious 
for their use on the lines that were orthodox for their Western inventors. 

‘The elaborate and costly equipment which had been invented on the 
European battlefields of the General War [of a.d. 1914-1918], in operations 
on level ground between two highly organised armies, was very much 
less effective when employed against parties of tribesmen lurking in a 
tangle of mountains.’ 1 

On the other hand, 

‘as a fighting man the WazTr and the Mahsud, always more particularly 
the latter, when in his own country, may be classed very high. Agile and 
enduring, he is possessed on his own hillsides of an astonishing mobility, 
which is intensified by complete disregard of impedimenta, as well as 
by a natural hardiness that greatly simplifies all supply problems. His 
skill with the small-bore rifle is considerable, and is only surpassed by a 
great capacity to exploit the slightest weakness shown by his enemy. 
Disregard of methods of security on the one hand, a too slavish routine in 
their enforcement on the other, miscalculations as to time and space, all 
these faults have been repeatedly penalized by the Mahsud and WazTr. 
The tribesman is gifted with untiring patience and vigilance in observing 
an enemy when the latter is on the move, a characteristic which makes 
it extremely difficult to outflank or to surprise him. He is an expert in 
the attack of detached posts and in the surprise of small parties. This skill 
may be enhanced by the employment of ruses which can justly be stig¬ 
matized as closely akin to treachery.’ 1 

In order to defeat, even inconclusively, transfrontier barbarians who 
have attained the degree of military expertise shown by the Mahsuds in 
a.d. 1919 and by the Rifis in a.d. 1925, the Power behind the threatened 
limes has to exert an effort that—measured in terms either of man¬ 
power or of equipment or of money—is quite disproportionate to the 
modest challenge from its gadfly opponents to which this ponderous 
counter-attack is the irreducible minimum of response. 

‘The maximum fighting strength of the Mahsuds was estimated at 
16,000 and that of the Wana Wazlrs (who did not follow the example of 

1 Toynbee, op. cit.. p. <57. 

* de Watteville, H.: Waxirittan, 1919-1020 (London 1925, Constable), p. 23. 
Evidence bearing out this appreciation will be found payim. There arc striking examples 
on pp. 130, 156, 207-9, and 213. The quotations from this book have been made with 
the permission of the publishers. 



THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE 23 

the Tochi Wazirs in submitting) at 7,000; but the effective number of 
combatants was limited by the number of efficient breach-loading rifles 
at their disposal, and this was estimated at not more than 8,000 in the 
case of the Mahsuds and 3,000 in that of the Wana Wazirs. Moreover, 
the number of small-bore rifles burning smokeless powder which the 
recalcitrant tribesmen possessed was estimated (even after their capture 
in May 1919) at not more than 3,500 in all, and this limited the size of the 
tribal force which would be under arms at any given moment, since 
throughout the campaign the tribesmen rigidly refrained, in daylight 
operations, from using rifles burning black powder, in order not to reveal 
their positions to the enemy. The largest force ever actually assembled 
at one moment was believed to have numbered 4,500, but this number 
was quite exceptional. 1 * 

'On the other side the Indian Expeditionary Force numbered 29,256 
combatants and 34,987 non-combatants on the 13th November, 1919, and 
rose to an eventual daily average of 41,800 combatants and 37,900 non- 
combatants approximately . . . [But] less than a fifth of the total force, 
and hardly more than a fifth of the combatants, could be included in the 
Striking Force, which consisted on the 8th November of 8,500 com¬ 
batants, 6,500 followers, 1,400 horses and equipment animals, and 7,300 
transport animals’. 1 

The four years of arduous fighting between the forces of the British 
Indian Empire and the barbarians of Waziristan in a.d. 1919-23 were 
the significantly paradoxical consequence of a Third Anglo-Afghan War 
in which the barbarian belligerent had been defeated in a nine-days’ 
campaign (9th-17th May, 1919). The Afghan aggressors’ perform¬ 
ance had been as ignominious as the British victors’ had been brilliant; 3 

but this relatively easy victory over a vulnerably organized barbarian 
principality 4 had to be purchased by the civilized belligerent at the cost 
of a disproportionate effort of the same relative order of magnitude that 
was afterwards to be exacted by the harder task of chastising the elusive 
Mahsuds. On the Afghan side the concentration of regular troops at the 
end of April 1919 was estimated by the British military intelligence at a 
total figure of not more than 35,260 sabres and rifles, 5 while on the 
Indian side ‘at one time the strength of the force employed trans-Indus 
amounted to 340,000 men and 158,000 animals, and it will readily be 
understood that the maintenance of these numbers with depleted means 
of transportation was a problem of considerable difficulty.’ 6 The diffi¬ 
culties were increased by an epidemic of cholera and a heat wave, 7 and by 


I See de Wntteviile, op. cit., pp. 24-25.—A.J.T. 

3 Toynbee, op. cit., pp. 556-7, following de Wattevillc, op. cit. 

’ A brief account of this war will be found in Toynbee, A. J.: Survey of International 
Jiff airs, 2920-1923 (London 1925, Milford), pp. 376-84. 

* In terms of the barbarian reservoir beyond the limes of the Roman Empire on the 
European Continent the war-bands of Waziristan might be compared with those of 
the Transrhenane German tribes that annihilated Varus’s army in a.d. 9, whereas the 
principality’ of Afghanistan might be compared with the Bohemian principality of Maro- 
boduus, which was saved from Roman attack in a.d. 6 by the outbreak of a Pannoman 
revolt, or with the Transylvanian principality of Decebalua, which was conquered by 
the Romans in A.D. iot-6. 

s Dispatch, dated the 1st November, 1919, from General Sir C. C. Monro, Com- 
mandcr-in-Chicf in India (printed as Second Supplement to the London Gazelle of 
the 12th March, 1920), §§ 20-21. _ ....... 

6 Monro, op. cit., § 5- 7 See ,b,d -> §$ x 6 _, 7 - 



24 HEROIC AGES 

the size of the theatre of operations. This problem of geographical scale 
was given prominence in the report of the British Commander-in-Chief. 

'During the course of the war our troops were engaged on a front 
extending along the whole length of the Afghan frontier from Chitral on 
the north-east to Seistan on the south-west, a total distance of about 
x,ooo miles; indeed, the fighting front may be said to have extended still 
further, for our line of communication defence troops on the 300 miles 
of road between Robat and Rui Khaf were kept constantly on their guard 
against raids from across the border and were at one time directly threat¬ 
ened by a small Afghan force which was detached from Herat towards 
the Persian frontier. Never before have simultaneous operations been 
undertaken on the frontier of India which have covered so wide an extent 
of front.’ 1 

The ascertained maximum trans-Indus British strength of 340,000, 
unlike the estimated Afghan strength of 35,260, included, of course, 
non-combatants, and the Afghans were thought to have been counting 
in A.D. 1919 on raising the unsubdued barbarians, on either side of 
the theoretical Indo-Afghan frontier, whose total strength in a levie 
en masse was estimated at approximately 120,000 rifles. Yet, even if 
Amanallah had not been disappointed in this hope (as in a.d. 1925 ‘Abd- 
al-Karim was to be disappointed in his similar hope of raising the tribes¬ 
men of the Atlas), and if the forces of the British Indian Empire had had 
to meet a combined force of 150,000 Afghan regular and tribal irregular 
barbarian fighting-men, their maximum total number of men employed 
trans-Indus would still have been more than double the total number of 
their adversaries; and, if the ratio of non-combatants to combatants in 
General Monro’s force in the spring of a.d. 1919 was the same, or 
thereabouts, as it was in the expeditionary force that was operating in 
Waziristan later in the same year, 2 this immense mobilization of man¬ 
power would only have enabled the British Indian Empire to meet the 
Afghan regular army and tribal levy with a combatant strength that, if 
the tribesmen had actually risen en masse, would have been no more 
than just equal to the barbarian enemy's combined total. 

The most significant point about this disparity between the efforts 
respectively required of the British and of their opponents on the 
North-West frontier of India in a.d. 1919 was that the disparity had 
recently begun to increase, as is revealed by a comparison of the 
Waziristan campaigns of a.d. 1917 and a.d. 1919 with their predecessors 
in the series. 

‘In spite of the ease with which the campaign of 1917 was brought to 
its conclusion, certain facts were already becoming patent. Whereas in 
i860 a single brigade had marched right through Waziristan without grave 
hindrance, and whereas in 1894 and 1901 widely separated columns were 
employed with impunity, yet for many years it was beginning to be 
believed that an invader of Waziristan must employ greater forces and 
observe greater precautions. Further, just as the MahsQds were acquiring 
more rifles of range and precision firing smokeless powder, and also 
exhibiting greater skill in their use, so the invader was ever inclined to 

1 Monro, op. at., § 27. 


a See pp. 22-23, above- 



THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE 25 

resort to more scientific equipment and more impedimenta. In addition, 
public opinion now demanded more comforts for the troops, while a fresh 
difficulty was accruing out of the increasing number of medical units 
accompanying any expedition. Circumstances were thus all tending to 
complicate the transport problem and to augment the size of supply 
trains. Yet the lines of communication were unquestionably becoming 
more vulnerable than they were before the tribesmen possessed modern 
weapons. It was still necessary' to employ long convoys of primitive pack 
transport; even in 1919 motor transport was impracticable above the 
lower valleys.’ 1 

The same talc is told by the history of the Roman Imperial Army, 
which had, as we have seen, 2 to be progressively increased in numerical 
strength to offset the progressive increase in the military efficiency of 
the transfrontier barbarians whom it was its duty to hold at bay. When, 
early in the third century of the Empire’s existence, Scptimius Scverus 
{imperabat a . d . 193-211) added three new legions 1 to the thirty that had 
been maintained since a.d. 83* for the defence of the static frontiers that 
had been first marked out by Augustus {imperabat 31 b . c .- a . d . 14), the 
consequent additional strain on the Empire’s man-power and revenue 
was not very serious; but it was quite another matter when, early in the 
fourth century of the Empire’s existence, Diocletian {imperabat a . d . 
284-304) found himself compelled to raise the Army’s strength again, 
and this time from about 300,000 men to about 500,000. 


The Besieged Civilization's Inability to Redress the Balance by Recourse to 
Organization and Technique 

In an economically complex civilization with a money economy, any 
increase in the numerical strength of a regular standing army entails a 
corresponding increase in the pressure of taxation upon national income. 
The diversion of an intolerably large, and still insatiably growing, pro¬ 
portion of a dwindling national income to meet rising costs of public 
services is the most conspicuous of the social maladies that were the 
death of the Roman Empire in the West in the fifth century and in the 
Centre and East in the seventh century of the Christian Era; and, while 
one cause of this cancerous growth of the fiscal burden on the backs of the 
Roman Imperial Government’s subjects was an increase in the personnel 
of the Imperial Civil Service to fill an administrative vacuum arising 
from the progressive decay of local self-government, 1 a second cause— 
which would probably turn out to have been by far the more potent of 
the two, if all the relevant figures were known to us—was the increase in 
the man-power of the Imperial Army which was required in order to 
meet the increase in the transfrontier barbarians’ military efficiency. We 
do know that, in the annual budgets of the British Raj in India during 
the last century of its existence, the cost of defence (which, in practice, 
meant the defence of the North-West Frontier) was an item that absorbed 
a disconcerting proportion of the revenue. 6 


» de Watteville. op. cit., pp. 43 - 44 - , 

J In VI. vii. 156; 321, n. 2; and 3 * 3 . n. S- 1 See VI. vu. ij6. 

* See VI. vii. 321. n. 2. * See VI. vu. S9-60 and 166. 

* ‘The most striking feature on the expenditure side of the central budget is the very 



26 HEROIC AGES 

Thus, if the chronic warfare between the defenders and assailants of a 
limes is waged in terms of competitive staying power, the defence is 
bound to collapse sooner or later, since, so far as it is able to hold its 
own, it can achieve this only by exerting an effort which becomes more 
and more disproportionate to the effort exacted from its increasingly 
efficient barbarian adversaries. 1 In this situation there are two obvious 
courses to which the defence may resort in the hope of arresting, by one 
means or the other, this progressive deterioration of its own position. It 
can mobilize for the defence of the limes either its own capacity for 
organization and technique, in which a civilization is superior to its 
barbarian neighbours almost ex hypothesi, or its barbarian adversaries’ 
capacity for taking military advantage of the local terrain through which 
the limes runs. These two policies of elaborating its own organization 
and armaments and of recruiting barbarian man-power are not, of course, 
mutually exclusive, and a harassed Power behind a limes had usually 
resorted to both in its desperate search for some means of reversing the 
accelerating inclination of the scales of war in its barbarian opponents’ 
favour which is the inexorable effect of the passage of Time on a frontier 
where the civilized party is content to remain passive. 

In the last struggle for life of an Hellenic Civilization which had never 
been technical-minded and which had long since lost any faint pro¬ 
clivities in this direction that it might occasionally have displayed in 
earlier chapters of its history, it was not technique but organization that 
was called into play by Diocletian in his heroic attempt to solve a prob¬ 
lem of defence which had been shown to have become a question of life 
and death for the Roman Empire by the break-through of the trans¬ 
frontier barbarians into the interior of the Empire on all fronts during 
the anarchic years a.d. 235-84. 

Diocletian’s solution was to reorganize completely the Roman 
Imperial system of defence which had been left unchanged in principle 
during the three centuries that had elapsed since its original institution 
by Augustus. Augustus’s first concern had been to give the Hellenic 

high proportion of the expenditure on defence, which, under a scheme introduced in 
19*8-29, has been stabilised for a period of 4 years at Rs. 55 crorcs per year. This 
figure is over 60 per cent, of the total central revenues, and nearly a third of the total 
net centra! and provincial revenues of the country taken together’ (Report of the Indian 
Statutory Commission, presented May 1930, vol. i (London 1930, H.M. Stationery 
Office, Cmd. 3568), § 413. P- 36a). 

' The difference in the degree of the effort required from a civilized army and from a 
barbarian war-band in order to produce an equal quantum of military effect was once 
expressed in quaintly concrete financial terms by a correspondent of the present 
writer's in a comparison between the respective performances of the British Army and 
the Hijfizi Army against the Turkish Army in the General War of a . d . 1914-18. ‘From 
first to last, the military operations of the Hijazi Army accounted for 65,000 Turkish 
troops at the cost of less than £100 per head of subsidy, whereas, in the firitish Army’s 

E ns against the Turks, each Turkish casualty or prisoner cost from £1,500 to 
(Toynbee, A. J.: Suney of International Affairs , 1925. vol. i (London 1927, 
), p. 283, n. 2). 

Ibn Khaldun ( Muqaddamdt , translated by dc Slane, Baron Mc.G. (Paris 1863-8, 
Imprimcrie Impiriale, 3 vols.), vol. ii, pp. 92-94), propounds, as a general ‘law’, a ten¬ 
dency for the burden of taxation in an empire to grow heavier with the lapse of time, 
but (thinking, as he does, exclusively in terms of empires founded by Nomad bar¬ 
barians) he attributes this tendency to increasing demands of the imperial government 
for defraying rising costs of living incurred by the ruling elements. He makes no 
mention in this passage of rising costs of imperial defence. 



THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE 27 
World the maximum opportunity of recuperating from the exhaustion 
produced by a hundred years of social revolution rankling into civil war, 
and one of his measures for attaining this end had been to reduce to a 
minimum the swollen armies that had been mobilized for this fratricidal 
warfare in the last paroxysm of an Hellenic Time of Troubles. Apart from 
a modest personal body-guard, he had provided in his permanent mili¬ 
tary establishment for nothing in the nature of a reserve. His troops of 
the line barely sufficed to demarcate the Imperial frontiers; they were, 
in fact, little more than a police-cordon; and, for the security of the 
interior of the Empire, the Augustan regime relied, in lieu of an adequate 
provision for defence, on the superiority of its professional army over 
the transfronticr barbarians in military quality and on the awe inspired 
by Roman power, which might be expected to deter the barbarians 
from putting the Imperial defences to any serious practical test. 1 By 
Diocletian’s day this hazardously economical security system had long 
since gone bankrupt; for the military efficiency which the barbarians 
had been progressively acquiring in the school which the limes afforded 
had eventually given them both the nerve and the skill to break through 
the cordon confining them; and in such an emergency the Imperial 
Government’s only means of repairing one breach was to risk another 
by denuding some distant sector of the frontier that happened at 
the moment to be quiescent. Though the Romans held the interior 
lines and could avail themselves of easy and rapid water-transport 
across the maritime heart of their empire for shuttling troops from 
one breached frontier to another, the system was radically unsound, and 
Diocletian reformed it by taking a cue which Scptimius Severus had 
given to his successors when he had placed one of his three new legions 
in reserve at Albano. Diocletian organized a reserve which amounted in 
numbers to perhaps not much less than two-fifths of the total strength 
of a military establishment that was perhaps larger by two-thirds than 
the Severan ; J the best units in the Army were assigned to this new force ; 3 
and it was designed to be as mobile as the raiding barbarian war-bands 
which it was its task to overtake, bring to battle, and destroy. 4 

From the scientific standpoint of a professional soldier, this Diocletia- 
nic system of substituting defence in depth for linear defence by organiz¬ 
ing a mobile reserve in support of the front line represents a notable 
advance in the art of war; and it was no doubt partly owing to this 
military reform that the Empire—which had seemed to be in the throes 
of dissolution during the half century immediately preceding Diocle¬ 
tian’s accession—actually held out for a hundred years longer in the 
West and for three hundred years longer in the East and Centre. Yet, 
though the civilian population might find the conditions of the Dio- 
cletianic Age a relief from those of the foregoing bout of anarchy, they 
would have been happy indeed to exchange them for those of the 
militarily archaic Augustan Principate. 


'he greatness of the Roman People has propagated an awe of them beyond the 
and beyond the Empire's established limits’ (Tacitus: Germania, chap, xxix. 


« ’The 

Rhine . _ . _ ■ . 

§3, apropos of the relation of a transfrontier Teuton community, the Mattiaci, to the 
Roman Empire in the writer's day). 1 See VI. vii. 323, n. 5. 

> See VI. vii. 322. « See VI. vii. 323. 



28 HEROIC AGES 

The truth is that Diocletian’s professionally admirable military re¬ 
organization dealt the civilian population a double blow. On the one 
hand the belated provision of a numerically sufficient mobile reserve 
accounted for that huge increase in the total military establishment 
which had, as we have seen, 1 to be paid for by the higher taxation of a 
lower national income. On the other hand the concentration of the Hite 
of the Army in the mobile reserve still further lowered the moral, as well 
as the efficiency, of the cordon-troops (now explicitly called limitanei, 
to distinguish them invidiously from the comitatenses serving in the 
Emperor’s counter-war-band); the last pretence of the Army’s being 
able to hold the barbarians at the limes was now virtually abandoned; 
and it came to be taken for granted that the war-zone, in the warfare 
between the Roman Imperial Army and its barbarian adversaries, was 
no longer the glacis on the barbarians’ side of the limes, and no longer 
even the marches of the Empire in the limes' immediate rear, but terri¬ 
tories in the interior that were the Empire’s economic and cultural vitals. 
The scientifically impeccable watchword of ‘defence in depth’ was, in 
fact, a euphemism for glozing over the humiliating and disastrous fact 
that the civilian producer of the national income, after he had been 
fleeced once by the Imperial inland revenue authorities to pay for a vast 
increase in the Imperial military establishment, was now exposed to the 
additional affliction of being fleeced for a second time by barbarian 
raiders whom the Diocletianic new-model army could not, after all, 
prevent from ravaging the Empire's heartlands. 2 

This attempt to solve the problem of defence by an improvement in 
organization, which was such a brilliant failure in the military history of 
the Diocletianic Roman Empire, had brought in better returns to 
Powers burdened with anti-barbarian frontiers in a Modern Western 
World. General Sir C. C. Monro’s lightning victory over the Afghans 
in a . d . 1919 was a triumph of organization in a sudden emergency; 
Marshal Lyautey’s gradual pacification of the Atlas highlands between 
a . d . 1907 and a . d . 1934 3 was a still more signal triumph of organization 
applied to the deliberate execution of a long-term plan; and these are 
merely two illustrations out of a multitude lying ready to the historian’s 
hand. In the policy of Modem Western imperial governments, however, 
the resort to organization as a means of redressing an unfavourably 
inclining balance in the defence of a limes was overshadowed by the 
resort to technique in an age when Western technology was advancing 
at an unprecedented pace into a previously undreamed-of wonderland of 
scientific discover}’ and practical ‘know-how’. 

In such circumstances the Western parties to the conflict between 
Civilization and Barbarism might well feel confident of being able to set 
so hot a pace in the progressive application of technology to border war¬ 
fare that their barbarian competitors would find themselves run off their 

* On p. 25. above. 

1 This is the burden of Zosimus’s critique of the Diocletianic reorganization of the 
Roman system of imperial defence (see VI. vii. 320, n. 6). 

J Marshal Lyautey himself retired in a.d. 1925, nine years before his work was com¬ 
pleted by his successors; but the credit for the whole achievement morally belongs to 



THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE 29 
feet. If the barbarian had shown himself able to procure from abroad 
and even passably imitate at home a relatively simple product of the 
Modern Western technique, such as an up-to-date breach-loading rifle, 
was it not the obvious retort for his Western adversary to raise the 
technological level of competition in armaments from small-arms to 
artillery, from fire-arms to the aeroplane, and—in terms of the release of 
atomic energy—from the non-fissile to the fissile type of explosive for 
the manufacture of bombs? For, even if the barbarian could procure 
aeroplanes from abroad and could learn to become as skilful an air-pilot 
as he had already become a marksman, it was hardly conceivable that he 
could provide for the servicing of aeroplanes, not to speak of installing 
the plant for manufacturing them, and it was virtually out of the ques¬ 
tion for him to procure atom bombs from abroad, and quite out of the 
question for him to acquire and apply the ‘know-how’ of manufacturing 
them and detonating them. When Western Man had crowned a century 
of scientific achievement by discovering how to harness atomic energy 
to the service of War, it looked indeed as if it now lay in his power (if he 
could reconcile this with his conscience) literally to annihilate the last 
surviving rearguards of Barbarism in their last remaining pockets of 
unsubdued territory—always supposing that these condemned barbarian 
prisoners of a ubiquitous industrial Western Civilization were not 
reprieved, after all, by seeing the Western masters of the World destroy 
one another first in an atomic fratricidal warfare. 

This thesis that technique is a winning card in Civilization’s hand is 
forcefully presented in a passage from the pen of a brilliant observer of a 
campaign in which a Modern Western Power overthrew a barbarian 
opponent on his own ground by bringing into action against him the 
Western technique of the Pre-Atomic Age. 

‘Haifa is nearly four hundred miles from the Atbara; yet it was the 
decisive point of the campaign; for in Haifa was being forged the deadliest 
weapon that Britain has ever used against Mahdism—the Sudan Military 
Railway. In the existence of the railway lay all the difference between the 
extempore, amateur scrambles of Wolscley’s campaign and the machine- 
like precision of Kitchener’s. When Civilisation fights with Barbarism it 
must fight with civilised weapons; for with his own arts on his own ground 
the barbarian is almost certain to be the better man. To go into the Sudan 
without complete transport and certain communications is as near mad¬ 
ness as to go with spears and shields. Time has been on the Sirdar’s side, 
whereas it was dead against Lord Wolseley; and of that, as of every point 
in his game, the Sirdar has known how to ensure the full advantage. There 
was fine marching and fine fighting in the campaign of the Atbara; the 
campaign would have failed without them; but without the railway there 
could never have been any campaign at all. The battle of the Atbara was 
won in the workshops of Wady Haifa.’ 1 

By thus availing himself of a modem Western technology's earliest 
achievement in the field of mechanical transport, a British general who 
had been trained as a military engineer was able, in a.d. 1898, to re¬ 
conquer, in little more than six months, an Eastern Sudan whose war- 

1 Stcevenj, G. W.: With Kitchener to Khartum (Edinburgh and London 1898, Blade- 
wood), chap. 3, ad init., pp. 22-23. 


30 HEROIC AGES 

like barbarian denizens, in a.d. 1881-5, had thrown off a sixty-years-old 
Egyptian domination and had signally defeated the hazardously amateur 
efforts which Egypt’s British conquerors had made at the eleventh hour 
to salvage a crumbling Egyptian regime without having time to employ 
those scientific methods by which Kitchener was subsequently to retrieve 
his predecessors’ disastrous failures. This victory of a British-built rail¬ 
way over the Madhist barbarians of the Eastern Sudan in a.d. 1898 had 
been anticipated by the victory of a Russian-built railway over the 
Turkmen barbarians of Transcaspia in a.d. 1873-86,' and that triumph 
of Western technique in the hands of Orthodox Christian converts to a 
Western technological civilization was still more impressive than its sub¬ 
sequent emulation by the countrymen of George Stevenson, who might 
have been expected to be the first in the field in any application of a 
technical device that was an English invention. 

A generation later, when this Western feat of harnessing steam-power 
had been eclipsed by the more extraordinary feat of harnessing atomic 
energy, it was a temptation for Western minds to assume that the prob¬ 
lem of anti-barbarian frontiers had now been solved decisively by the 
progress of Western technology up to date. At the time of writing, how¬ 
ever, atomic energy had not yet been used for the destruction of either 
Barbarism or Civilization; and the recent experience of Western Powers 
in trying to offset their barbarian opponents’ skill in adapting the use of 
Modem Western weapons and tactics to the local terrain by bringing 
into action, on their own side, additional Modern Western weapons, of 
ever more elaborate kinds, had demonstrated that the elaboration of 
technique, like the elaboration of organization, carried with it certain 
inherent drawbacks in addition to the untoward social effect of its 
crushingly heavy cost to the tax-payer and the untoward educational 
effect of its initiation of the barbarian into the ever more formidable 
tricks of his civilized adversary’s trade. 1 These inherent drawbacks to 
an elaboration of technique might go far towards neutralizing even the 
military effect of this expedient for redressing the balance of power 
between Civilization and Barbarism along a static limes. 

These limitations upon the effectiveness of Technology as one of 
Civilization’s weapons against Barbarism are illustrated by the history 
of the Waziristan campaign of a.d. 1919-20. At the opening of these 
operations ‘the efficiency of the troops in India had sunk to a lamentably 
low ebb,’ 3 and 'it became manifest, soon after the expedition set out, that 
there was no alternative but to rely on a liberal employment of artillery 
and on a lavish expenditure of ammunition and of engineer stores to 
counterbalance the initial lack of skill displayed by the troops’. 4 In this 
campaign, in the end, ‘the aeroplane, the howitzer, the gun, and the 

' See V. V. 223, n. 3, and p. 139, below. 

* .‘The development of any strategic perception or of a more far-seeing or reasoned 
leading among the frontier tribes is perhaps improbable. On the other hand, should 
any such tendencies creep into their conduct of war, and should the tribesmen ever, 
by any chance, be supported by skilled advice, or find themselves in the possession of 
efficient artillery, numerous machine guns or stocks of grenades and analogous adjuncts 
of war, the prospect of entering on a campaign of this nature without highly trained 
troops is not alluring' (dc Watteville, op. cit., p. 210). 

* Ibid. * Ibid., p. 91. 


THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE 3 * 
grenade’ duly ‘redressed the balance’ 1 which had been inclined in the 
Mahsud barbarian’s favour by his superiority to the British Indian 
soldier in individual prowess as a fighting-man using a Modem Western 
rifle on his own intractable ground. But the British expeditionary force’s 
dependence on an elaborate equipment proved a source of weakness in 
two respects. In the first place, ‘under conditions where the capacity of 
the transport constitutes a dominant factor, the greater the skill and 
mobility of the troops, the smaller the amount of stores and of transport 
required, and the greater the resultant freedom of action in the conduct 
of the operations.’ 2 The British expeditionary force’s dependence on 
equipment tied it by the leg, 3 and in the second place the military 
advantage purchased at this high cost in loss of mobility was at a mini¬ 
mum on this terrain. ‘The tactical methods permissible in the great 
struggle in Flanders’ did not ‘turn out appropriate to the nature of 
Indian mountain warfare’. 4 

‘Where large masses can be used, where artillery and high explosive 
predominate, certain tactical processes of a rather crude nature can be 
employed, and the training of the individual can remain more elementary. 
... But on the Indian frontier the case is very different. In mountain war¬ 
fare, as it still remains in spite of all progress achieved in modem military 
equipment, numbers will rarely be present, while the enemy is particularly 
expert in the use of ground and of the rifle. Those who attack such a 
formidable fighting man, over terrain of his own choosing, must be able 
to compete with him individually on more or less level terms. Otherwise 
the handicap becomes too great. . . . The soldier required for frontier 
warfare must be trained for the end in view. 5 . . . The incidents of the 
campaign of 1919-20 . . . prove in the most unmistakable fashion the 
value, or rather the absolute necessity, of a very high standard of in¬ 
dividual training among all combatant troops employed in a mountain 
expedition.’ 6 

The Barbarians' Military Elusiveness and Economic Parasitism 

The technique which thus proved to be no adequate substitute for 
personal skill and prowess on the civilized belligerent’s side had a 
further drawback that was still more disconcerting: its hammer-blows 
were apt to beat the air 7 without inflicting any decisive damage on a tar¬ 
get which was as elusive and intangible as the armaments brought to 
bear against it were unwieldy. 

While, at the time of writing, it seemed possible, as has been sug¬ 
gested, 8 that the recent Western invention of the atom bomb might 
prove physically capable of eliminating once for all a pocket of un¬ 
subdued Barbarism, even in trackless mountain country, by literally 
annihilating all life within the recalcitrant area, it was perhaps doubtful 
whether even this tremendous weapon, however ruthlessly employed, 


» Ibid., p. 208. J Ibid., p. 91. 

> Sec Toynbee, A. J.: Survey of International Affairs, 1925, vol. i (London 1927, 
Milford), pp. 557 - 3 . 4 de Watteville, op. cit., p. 209. 

s Ibid., p. 209. 6 Ibid., p. 208. 

r The civilized belligerent’s difficulty in deciding upon hu military objective—not 
to speak of attaining it when it has been fixed—is touched upon in dc Watteville, op. 
cit., pp. 89 and 166. s On p. 30, above. 


32 HEROIC AGES 

could exterminate the Nomad barbarians of Arabia and the Sahara who 
were still eluding effective control by the sedentary Powers that were 
their nominal sovereigns. The taming of these Afrasian Nomads had 
been facilitated, as we have seen, 1 by the pre-atomic Western invention 
of mechanically driven vehicles whose caterpillar tracks could carry them 
over mud and sand; but the Nomad denizen of the Steppe enjoyed a 
social advantage in his contest with a sedentary antagonist which could 
not be impaired by any technical change in the conditions of warfare 
on his terrain. In the past, this Nomad type of transfrontier barbarian 
had notoriously been the most difficult for the Power behind the limes 
to cope with, because he was unhampered by the possession of immov¬ 
able property, so that his civilized assailant had no definite objective at 
which to aim and no power of bringing this mobile enemy to battle by 
threatening some fixed asset of his which he could not afford to leave 
undefended. The classical exposition of this invincible elusiveness of 
the Nomad is given in Herodotus’s account of the Achaemenian empire- 
builder Darius the Great’s unsuccessful attempt to incorporate in his 
dominions the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe by subduing 
its Scythian rangers of that day. After marching and counter-marching 
over the face of the Steppe without coming any nearer to bringing the 
Scythians to battle, 

'Darius sent a despatch-rider to the King of the Scythians, I dan thyrsus, 
with the following message: "You are a queer fellow! I cannot under¬ 
stand why you keep perpetually on the run when you have two alternatives. 
If you consider yourself a match for my force, for God’s sake stop this 
dodging, stand your ground, and fight; but, if you know in your heart 
that you are outclassed, then, if that is the position, again I say: for God’s 
sake stop trekking, bring me offerings of earth and water as acknowledg¬ 
ments that I am your lord and master, and then we can start talking." 
Idanthyrsus’s answer to this overture was as follows: "Master Persian, 

I will put my cards on the table. Never in my life have I run away from 
anybody out of fear—never in the past, and not now from you. What you 
have found me doing now is exactly what I habitually do in peace-time; 

I have made no change. And now I will explain, too, why I do not 
promptly give you battle. The reason is that we possess neither cities 
that we might be afraid of your capturing nor plantations that we might 
be afraid of your cutting down, so there is nothing to push us into fighting 
a pitched battle with you. But, if you really have to be in such a hurry to 
seek a decision, let me tell you that we do have tombs in which our 
ancestors lie buried. Now, just you find those tombs and try to desecrate 
them, and then you will discover whether we shall fight you for those 
tombs or not. Short of that, we shall not engage you unless we see reason 
for doing so.’* 

While the Nomad herdsman on the Steppe thus provides a classical ’ 
illustration of the transfrontier barbarian’s elusiveness, the sedentary 
highlander barbarian’s way of life neutralizes the effect of the elaborate 
weapons of Civilization to a hardly lesser degree by the same retort of 
denying them an adequate target. It is true that the sedentary barbarian 


1 On p. 19, above. 

* Herodotus: Book IV, chaps. 116-7. 



THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE 33 
has given some vulnerable hostages to Fortune. The Power behind the 
limes may retaliate for the wild highlander’s raids into imperial territory 
by destroying the offending war-band’s villages and burning its crops; 
and in the Air Age the champions of Civilization could take these 
punitive measures without having to follow the toilsome and risky 
traditional course of marching an expeditionary force on foot into the 
highlander’s fastness. They could send over a few aircraft to do, in a few 
minutes, without hazard to themselves, a stint of destruction that might 
have cost a ground-force weeks of fighting and hundreds of casualties; 
yet nothing is gained by any improvement in the technical means of 
executing a military operation when the operation itself is intrinsically 
futile in the sense of being ineffective for producing its intended political 
result; and punitive measures against even a sedentary transfronticr 
barbarian are apt to achieve the very opposite of their purpose—which 
is to turn a brigand into a good neighbour. 

Depriving the barbarian of one season’s crop is an ineffectual measure 
of coercion so long as the barbarian himself lives to raise another crop 
next year (as he will, unless the work of destruction is repeated annually); 
and burning or bombing his house is likewise ineffectual when he is 
capable of rebuilding this crude structure of wattle and daub, or of un¬ 
hewn stones plastered over with mud, with his own hands in one winter, 
during spare months in which he can neither work in the fields nor go on 
the war-path.' This capacity of his for quickly repairing, by self-help, 
any material damage inflicted on him by the fortunes of war is one 
example of a general social ‘law’ that we have encountered in another 
context. 2 In warfare between antagonists that arc not on an equality in 
their level of civilization, the more highly civilized belligerent is apt to 
win victories that are pyrrhic because they leave the victor exhausted, 
while his less highly civilized opponent is apt to suffer defeats that arc 

« As the writer was penning these lines, he was having a vivid recollection of two 
meetings of his with a Turkish peasant in a village in Western Anatolia. When this 
kindly Turk first gave the writer hospitality in his house in the winter of A.D. 1920-1, 
the house and the whole village were intact, and, when the same host gave the same guest 
hospitality for the second time in the spring of a.d. 1923, he again had a house in which 
to receive a visitor, and this house was again surrounded by a cluster of other simple 
houses of the kind. If the visitor had not happened to know that, since his previous visit, 
the whole village had been rased to the ground in the last phase of the Graeco-Turkish 
war of a . d . 1919-22, he would never have guessed that the house in which he was being 
received on this second occasion was not physically the same house that had given him 
a night’s shelter before. The change that was manifest even to a foreigner's eye was not 
the loss and replacement of the house but the difference in the spirits of its owner. On 
the first occasion the Turkish householder had been patently depressed by the ex¬ 
perience of living under enemy occupation—the village being at that time on the Greek 
side of a Graeco-Turkish military’ front. On the second occasion, which was after the 
eventual Greek ddbficle, the village was free and the householder’s spirits were high. 
'All is well now-, you see’, he said. 'Those Greek soldiers are not here any longer. Yes, 
they burnt the village before they left, and my house with the rest—the house in which 
I had the pleasure of entertaining you last time you were passing this way. But, you see, 
we all built new houses for ourselves last winter, and now we have done our spring 
sowing, so the damage has been repaired and—we are also free men once more.’ 

The material standard of life in this West Anatolian Turkish village, which seemed 
primitive to a West European eye, would have seemed lordly to a contemporary Kurd 
from Dcrsim or Mahsud from Waiiristan; and thus the ability of this Turkish village 
community to reconstruct the material basis of its life in a single season gives the measure 
of the Kurd’s and the Pathan's capacity for economic recuperation on their own lower 
economic level. « In IV. iv. 393-4. 


B 2898. vui 


C 




34 HEROIC AGES 

inconclusive because of the recuperative power that is Nature’s com¬ 
pensation for the handicap of backwardness in organization. 

The operation of this law as between the East Roman Empire and 
Bulgaria in the tenth and eleventh centuries of the Christian Era proved 
to be the key to the subsequent collapse of the victor and revival of his 
victim, and we noticed in this connexion how, in the General War of 
a . d . 1914-18 and its immediate sequel, a highly organized Germany 
remained prostrate owing to the exhausting effect of her barren victories 
long after a relatively primitive Turkey and Russia had managed to take 
the field again notwithstanding their recent shattering defeats. The same 
‘law’ can be seen at work in the warfare between transfrontier barbarians 
and the Power behind the limes. So long as the people themselves are not 
physically annihilated—and a transfrontier barbarian has the proverbial 
nine lives of a cat—the barbarian belligerent cannot be brought to heel 
by destroying his rudimentary and readily replaceable property. So far 
from being an effective sanction, this punitive destruction of property 
has the effect of confirming him in the predatory way of life from which 
it is intended to deter him; for if the barbarian is exasperated—and, 
still more, if he is both exasperated and starved through being deprived 
by hostile military action of the product of even the modicum of peaceful 
handiwork that he has still been carrying on side by side with a guerrilla 
warfare that has already become his major occupation—the double 
pressure of necessity and resentment will move him more than ever to 
look for his livelihood to the deeds of war instead of to the works of 
peace. 

A consciousness of this ‘boomerang’ effect of punitive action perplexed 
the British guardians of the North-West Frontier of India during the 
last chapter of their stewardship. 

‘In common with all other peoples in a similar stage of social develop¬ 
ment, the Mahsuds possessed no organic centres, the destruction of which 
could so far impair their economic or social welfare as would infallibly 
bring them to their knees. Makin, one of their main centres of population, 
in addition to countless other villages, had been devastated during pre¬ 
vious campaigns by way of punitive retaliation, yet such measures had 
never effectually put an end to their perennial acts of brigandage. Fines 
had been levied, but the tribesmen had continued to retrieve such losses 
by plundering their weaker neighbours. Rifles had been confiscated (!), 
yet in the end this measure seemed only to encourage further thefts and 
murders in order to replace the (not numerous) surrendered weapons. 
There is a point beyond which reprisals cannot be carried without pro¬ 
voking undue exasperation or else bringing the subjects of this treatment 
to partial starvation, unless, indeed, the regular forces imitate the Ger¬ 
mans when they methodically drove the Hottentots into the Omaheke 
Desert—there to die of thirst. But on the [North-West] Frontier [of 
India], even apart from the ethical side of the question, such action is not 
practicable. . .. The success of any punitive expedition is best gauged by 
the permanence of the moral impression which it leaves on the un¬ 
civilised mind. ... In the case of the Mahsuds, punitive expeditions had 
failed to cause the desired moral impression for any length of time. ,, 


« de Watte ville, op. dt., pp. 92-93. 



THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE 35 

The ineffectiveness of the expedient of destroying a recalcitrant bar¬ 
barian’s property was indeed demonstrated afresh in the Waziristan 
campaign of a.d. 1919-20 when a British column at last reached the 
Mahsud ‘town’ of Kaniguram at the cost of nearly twelve weeks’ march¬ 
ing and fighting. 

‘Previous history . . . lends colour to the belief that the Mahsuds were 
convinced that the Striking Force had now nearly achieved its worst; it 
might still destroy Kaniguram, but must then retire. These things had 
happened before, and in any case would not very deeply affect any but 
the inhabitants of the place itself. The rifles would thus remain, while 
raiding and looting would eventually make good the losses incurred by 
the tribesmen during the campaign.’ 1 

'Much the same difficulty was to be experienced at Wana as had been 
encountered at Kaniguram.... The destruction of towers and of principal 
houses belonging to those sections [of the Wana Wazirs] known to be 
hostile was then taken in hand. But such measures did not appear to 
accelerate the rate of payment of the fine or of surrender of rifles. . . . 
Moreover, the majority of the more distant tribal sections, inhabiting 
districts bordering on Afghanistan, are virtually nomads owning no landed 
property, no dwellings, nor crops. They wander among the mountains of 
Waziristan and can take refuge across the Afghan border if hard pressed. 
The problem of bringing these people to submission seemed insoluble.’ 2 

The fact is that punitive measures defeat their own object by ac¬ 
centuating an already prevalent tendency in the transfrontier barbarian’s 
social evolution which is precisely what has made him such an awkward 
neighbour. 3 If the transfronticr barbarian had remained an unmodified 
primitive man living in the static Yin-state in which the genuinely 
primitive societies were found as far back in Time as the existing evidence 
carried a twentieth-century Western historian’s knowledge of them, a 
decidedly greater proportion of his total energies would have been 
devoted to the arts of peace and a correspondingly greater coercive effect 
would have been produced upon him by the punitive destruction of the 
products of his pacific labours. The tragedy of a ci-devant primitive 
society’s moral alienation from an adjoining civilization by which it has 
previously been attracted is that the consequent deterioration of their 
relation from one of progressive cultural radiation-and-mimesis to one of 
chronic hostilities leads the barbarian to neglect his former peaceful 
avocations in order to specialize in the art of border warfare—first in self- 
defence, in order to save himself from subjugation or annihilation at the 
hands of a civilization that has turned savage, and later—when his growth 
in military efficiency on his own terrain has gradually reversed the balance 
of military advantage in his favour—as an alternative means of making 
his livelihood. To plough and reap vicariously with sword and spear 4 is 
more lucrative for the barbarian now that a civilization which has been 
thrown on the defensive can be mulcted of its wealth by way of either 
loot or subsidies, and this is also more congenial to him now that the 

* Ibid., p. 16s. „ . 2 Ibid., pp. 175-6. 

* Thi* distinctive social evolution of the transfrontier barbarian has been touched 
upon, by anticipation, in V. v. 230-3, apropos of its reflection in the field of religion. 

« See Gilbert Murray’s translation of the song of Hybrias—an heir of barbanan Greek 
conquerors of a Minoan Crete—in III. iii. 87, n. 1. 



36 HEROIC AGES 

barbarian has become a warrior first and foremost and has remained only 
secondarily a husbandman. The barbarian adjoining a limes thus ceases 
to be economically self-supporting and becomes an economic parasite 
on the civilization on the other side of the military front. 1 

A classical illustration of this characteristic economic regression of the 
estranged barbarian proselyte of a disintegrating civilization is afforded 
by Tacitus’s description of the German denizens of the barbarian 
‘reservoir’ adjoining the Continental European times of the Roman 


1 While this economic retrogression of the barbarian in a ‘reservoir’ dammed back 
by a limes is one of the general effects of the erection of a timet in any physical environ¬ 
ment, the effect naturally varies in degree in proportion to the extent of the difference 
between the regions segregated from one another by the limes in point of relative 
economic attractiveness or unattractiveness. Es'idently the ‘reservoir’ barbarian will be 
the more prone to seek his livelihood by plundering his civilized neighbour’s garden 
than to seek it by cultivating his own wilderness, the more forbidding the wilderness is, 
and the more smiling the garden. A case in point is the poverty of the Pathan highlands 
bv comparison with the adjoining lowlands of Afghanistan as well as Pakistan (see 
Toynbee, A. J.: Survey 0/ International Affairs, 1925, vol. 1 (London 1927, Milford), 

PP Tis of some importance, because one of the considerations that are apt to 
decide an empire-builder to draw- his limes along a particular line, short of haying 
reached ‘a natural frontier’, is that, along this line, he has found himself at the limit of 
the area that he can reckon on being able to exploit economically, with profit to himself, 
by means of the economic technique of which he is master—at whatever stage of techno¬ 
logical ‘know-how’ he may happen to be at the time when he is choosing the line for 
his limes. This last qualification has to be added because a country-side that is econo¬ 
mically profitable for a society at one level of economic technique may be economically 
unprofitable for a society at another level. For the Romans round about the beginning 
of the Christian Era it was economically unprofitable to saddle themselves cither with 
North European territories in which the post-glacial forest still had the upper hand over 
a primitive agriculturist’s attempts to clear it, or with an Arabian desert which the 
sedentary husbandman could never hope to dispute with the stock-breeding Nomad. 
Accordingly the Romans drew their European limes just short of the coal-deposits in 
the Ruhr, and their Syrian limes short of the oil-deposits in Arabia. 

The Romans did not live to regret this economic blindness of theirs, since their empire 
came and went before the technique for turning coal and mineral oil to economic 
account was discovered by the latter-day children of a Western Civilization sprung 
ire’s ruins. On the other hand, there were Modem Western 


from the Roman 


m 


had lightheartedly disinterested themselves, in the belief that they were valueless, turn 
out to be of inestimable economic value in terms of new technological discoveries. The 
Powers more or less interested in a latter-day Arabia had no sooner completed the de¬ 
limitation of frontiers in that peninsula after the General War of a . d . 1914-18 than they 
were made aware, by the subsequent pioneer work of Western oil-prospectors, that 
the sub-soil of the deserts which they had been dividing between them by drawing 
imaginary straight lines on a small-scale non-gcological map was oozing with oil. An 
equally undreamed-of wealth of oil had likewise belatedly been discovered to underlie 
the surface of lands in the eastern part of the State of Oklahoma that had become the 
property of Indians descended from ‘the five civilized nations’ who had been relegated 
there since A.D. 1825 in the belief that, for the White Man, this was the least desirable 
piece of country within the whole vast area of the United States. In A.D. 19*2 there was 
a strange irony in the contrast between the respective current economic values of these 
oil-lands in Oklahoma, to which ‘the five nations’ had been deported, and {he cotton- 
lands in Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi, from which they had been evicted. A simi¬ 
lar reflection was suggested at the same date in England by the grass-clad solitudes 
that had replaced, on the Downs, the cultivation which the Roman had once found 
there in an age when the forest-clad plains of Britain were as inaccessible to the Celtic 
husbandman as the forest-clad plains of North America were to the Indian hunter at 
the time of the arrival of the White Man in the New World. 

On the morrow of a latter-day Western discovery of the technique of splitting the 
atom of one particular chemical clement, it looked as if a revaluation of the planet’s 
wealth in terms of uranium instead of gold might produce even more sensational 
surprises; and such surprises were bound to evoke correspondingly poignant regrets in 
the hearts of the makers of frontiers in a politically divided society embracing the entire 
surface of the globe. 



THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE 37 
Empire at a date by which this limes had been in existence for about a 
century and a half and had therefore had time to produce a limes’ 
typical social effects. Tacitus affirms 1 that cattle is the Germans’ sole 
form of wealth; but the relative unimportance of agriculture in the 
German economy of that day, which is implied in this and other 
passages of the Roman observer’s work, cannot have been due to 
ignorance or even to inexperience. 

'Archaeological investigation has now proved that the cultivation of 
cereals in the North of Europe goes back to the Stone Age. Of still greater 
importance is the discovery of the representation of a plough with two 
oxen among the rock-carvings at Tcgncby in Bohusliin, which date from 
the Bronze Age. However sceptical one may feel towards the dates fixed 
by archaeologists, this discovery shows without doubt that a highly de¬ 
veloped system of agriculture was practised in Sweden before the begin¬ 
ning of the Christian Era. Some other explanation of the accounts given 
by Caesar and Tacitus must therefore be found. What the true explana¬ 
tion is has been clearly shown by a careful examination of the various 
passages in which these writers refer to the subject. 1 The growth of the 
military spirit had led to a neglect of agriculture, as both writers 5 expressly 
state.’ 4 

This interpretation of the unimportance of agriculture 'in the 
economy of those Germans who were within range of Roman observa¬ 
tion in Tacitus’s day as being evidence, not of an infantile economic 
backwardness, but of a recent economic relapse from a higher pristine 

1 Tacitus: Germania, chap. 5. 

* ‘During the interval* between bouts of war, (the Germans] spend a little of their 
time in hunting, but most of it in doing nothing. They give themselves up to sleeping 
and eating, and it is precisely the bravest and most warlike of them that are the most 
idle. They lea% - e it to the women, the old men, and the unfit members of the family to 
look after the home, the household, and the field*, while the warriors laze. It is a curious 
incongruity in their character that they should so love sloth and at the same time *o 
hate tranquility' (Tacitus: Germania, chap. 15). 

J Whereas Tacitus attributes thi* neglect of agriculture to the Germans in general, 
without distinguishing in this matter between one Teutonic people and another, Caesar 
(Bellum GaUieum, Book IV, chap, i; cp. Book VI, chap. 22) attributes it to the Suebi 
in particular. The method, here ascribed by Caesar to the Suebi, of moving their quar¬ 
ter* every year and never cultivating the same piece of land a second time was remi¬ 
niscent of the primitive agriculture which Modern Western observers had seen prac¬ 
tised by Mayas in Yucatan (see II. ii. 418) and by Bantu peoples in Tropical Africa 
(see II. ii. 20-7). The Suebi were more remote from the Roman //met than the kindred 
Teutonic peoples to the west of them, and the explanation of their slovenliness in 
agriculture as being an effect of the limes is proportionately less convincing. At the same 
time, the hypothesis that they were recent initiates into the art of agriculture is un¬ 
tenable, in view of the fact that agriculture was long since well established among their 
northern neighbours in Scandinavia and their north-eastern neighbours in Estonia. 
A possible alternative explanation is suggested by a passage in Strabo ( Gtographiea , 
Book VII, chap, i, § 3, p. C 291) in which this Hellenic observer in the next generation 
after Caesar's ascribes to the Suebi a way of life which is not that of primitive cultivators 
but is that of the Eurasian Nomad stock-breeders. In Caesar’s and Strabo’s day the 
Suebi lived in a region between the south-eastern comer of the Baltic Sea and the north¬ 
western shore of the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe which, in the sub¬ 
sequent map of Western Christendom, was to be occupied by Lithuania ar.d Poland; 
and the local Polish and Lithuanian variety of a Western culture was to be marked Iv 
affected by the radiation of cultural influences from an adjoining Nomadic World. 
Might not the Suebi have previously succumbed, in the same habitat, to the same 
influences from the same quarter?—A.J.T. 

4 Chadwick, H. M.: The Origin of the English Nation (Cambridge 1907, University 
Press), pp. 286-7. The quotations from this book have been made with the permission 
of the publishers. 



38 HEROIC AGES 

state, is confirmed by Tacitus’s own observation that the Ests (Aestii)— 
who were living then, as now, on the eastern seaboard of the Baltic— 
‘cultivate cereals and the other fruits of the Earth with an assiduity that 
stands out in contrast to the typical German sloth’. 1 The habitat of these 
virtuous Estonian husbandmen lay to the north-east of the Teutonic 
peoples’ domain and was thus at a farther remove from the birthplace 
of agriculture somewhere in South-Western Asia. In travelling from 
Asia into Europe round the head of the Great Western Bay of the 
Eurasian Steppe, which was the western tip of Nomad’s Land, the 
technique of agriculture could have reached Estonia only by way of 
Germany, and the German peoples who had passed the art on to the 
Ests must once have been not less good husbandmen than the Ests still 
were when they were observed by Tacitus’s informants. When we ask 
ourselves why Tacitus’s Ests should have retained their hold on agri¬ 
culture while Tacitus’s Germans had lost theirs, the obvious answer is 
that, by comparison with Tacitus’s Germans, the Ests were remote, not 
only from the South-East Asian birthplace of the ancient invention of 
agriculture, but also from the Central European location of a recently 
established limes of the Roman Empire. While the Germans adjoining 
this limfis had had their lives turned upside-down by the experience of 
living at close quarters with it, the Ests had been left still high and dry 
on the farther side of the ‘reservoir’ which the erection of the limes had 
created. The Ests were still industriously practising agriculture for the 
same reason that explains why the Suebi, Goths, and Swedes were still 
remaining loyal to a patriarchal form of kingship, in contrast to the 
political instability which the south-western Germans in the recently 
created ‘reservoir’ had been exhibiting when they had abandoned this 
same traditional form of government, first for an Hellenic-inspired olig¬ 
archy and latterly for the likewise Hellenic-inspired dictatorship of a 
war-lord backed by his war-band.* 

Moreover, there is evidence that these north-eastern Germans out 
of range of the Roman limes had preserved not only their pristine politi¬ 
cal institutions but also the pristine devotion to agriculture that was 
characteristic of their eastern neighbours the Ests in Tacitus’s time. 
When, some three or four hundred years later, the Germans in ‘the 
reservoir’ adjoining the Roman limes at last broke through the dam and 
flooded Gaul and Britain, the social and economic devastation which was 
the first effect of this cataclysm was followed, after the human flood 
waters had soaked into the social soil, by an economic advance that was 
the reward of a new agricultural technique, and this new technique 
had been introduced by the barbarian invaders. The Frankish and 

1 Tacitus: Germania, chap. ^5, § 4. 

* For the survival ot a primitive patriarchal monarchy among the Teutonic peoples 
out of range of the Roman limes, see Dawson, Christopher: Religion and ike Rise of 
Western Culture (London 1950, Sheed & Ward), pp. 70-8 x, as well as the present 
Study, V. v. 213, n. 1—citing Chadwick, op. cit.,pp. 298-9 (a passage which is based 
on Tacitus: Germania, chap. 44)—and V. vi. 230-2. The interpretation of the war-lord 
in the barbarian ‘reservoir 1 as a counterpart of the Caesar on the other side of a limes 
will be found in V. vi. 4, n. 4, and on p. ro, above. The general contrast between the 
revolution that overtakes the transfrontier barbarians of 'the reservoir’ and the still 
undisturbed life of the transreservoir barbarians in a Hyperborean ‘back of beyond’ 
has been noticed in II. ii. 315-22, and on p. 4, above. 




THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE 39 
English war-bands brought with them into Northern Gaul and Eastern 
Britain the potent mould-board plough which, in the course of the Dark 
and Middle Ages, was to bring to fruition the latent fertility of heavy 
North European soils which had been impervious to the light plough 
used by Celts and Romans. Though, at the time of writing, Archaeology 
had not yet detected exactly when or where in Northern Europe this 
revolutionary technological invention had been made, it was manifest 
that it could not have been introduced into the former north-western 
provinces of the Roman Empire by transfronticr German invaders in the 
fifth century of the Christian Era unless these economically regressive 
barbarians had been able to learn—or re-leam—its use from north¬ 
eastern neighbours of theirs whose remoteness from a subversive Roman 
limes had permitted them still to follow their traditional way of life in an 
age in which the Germans in ‘the reservoir* had been demoralized by the 
military frontier’s proximity. 

A people that was still giving hostages to Fortune by still leading the 
pristine agricultural sedentary life of the Ests and Swedes of Tacitus’s 
day would evidently be more amenable than the elusive barbarians in 
‘the reservoir’ to the punitive action of a ‘civilized’ Power employing 
ponderous weapons; but the Power behind a limes has no quarrel with 
Hyperboraeans who arc not only innocent of offence against its imperial 
peace but are also insulated from any direct contact with its armed 
forces by ‘the reservoir' that lies between the limes and ‘the back of 
beyond’. The denizens of ‘the reservoir’ are the barbarians with whom 
the Power behind the limes is in a state of chronic war, and in this war¬ 
fare the economic regression that is the reverse side of the ‘reservoir’ 
barbarians’ militarization is the trump card in their hand. Thanks to 
this economic relapse, they have little material wealth to lose; and, hav¬ 
ing little to lose by war with the neighbouring civilization, they have 
little to fear from the continuance of hostilities, or indeed from their 
intensification. 


The Self-Defeat of a Policy of Setting a Thief to Catch a Thief 
This striking inequality in the material consequences of border war¬ 
fare for the two belligerents is reflected in a great and growing inequality 
between them in moral. For the children of a disintegrating civilization 
that is standing on the defensive—at any rate for a demilitarized majority 
of them in the interior, as distinct from a barbarized minority in the 
marches—the interminable border warfare with the barbarians beyond 
the limes spells the burden of an ever-increasing financial charge and the 
anxiety of a never solved military and political problem. For the bar¬ 
barian belligerent, on the other hand, the same warfare has the very 
opposite psychological associations. For him it is not a burden but an 
opportunity, not an anxiety but an exhilaration. A contest that is always 
harassing for the civilized party—and utterly devastating for him when 
he finds himself no nearer to being within sight of the end of it after he 
has mobilized all his resources of organization and technique—is the 
very breath of life for the militarized barbarian. This great and always 


40 .. HEROIC AGES 

increasing inequality in ‘psychological armament’ makes the discomfi¬ 
ture of the civilized belligerent inevitable sooner or later. 1 

In this situation it is not surprising that the party who is both author 
and victim of the limes should not resign himself to his doom without 
trying a last expedient. If his own resources have proved disappointingly 
inefficacious for redressing a balance that has been remorselessly inclin¬ 
ing against him, might he not be able to avert an otherwise manifest 
destiny by enlisting his barbarian adversary’s disastrously demonstrated 
prowess in a tottering civilization’s defence? If Brennus insolently threw’ 
his sword into the scale of Barbarism, why should not the scale of 
Civilization be saved, at the eleventh hour, from kicking the beam by 
deftly inserting into it the swords of a legendary Gallic barbarian’s living 
Teuton, Sarmatian, Hun, and Arab counterparts? 

This subtle policy of setting a thief to catch a thief might seem, indeed, 
to have everything to recommend it. The barbarian warrior is the citizen 
soldier’s superior in the art of border warfare because the barbarian is 
fighting here on his own familiar ground; and he has come to be also 
the citizen-soldier’s superior in personal prow r ess because he has 
acquired a zest for the profession of arms which his adversary has lost. 
This better military material can be purchased at a very much lower cost 
to the citizen-taxpayer; 2 and this cheap conversion of an enemy warrior 
into a friendly mercenary will doubly relieve the pressure on the limes 
by reducing pari passu both the power of the ‘reservoir’ barbarian to take 
the offensive and his incentive forgoing on the war-path. His power will 

1 This difference in altitude towards the ordeal of War likewise comes to light be¬ 
tween parties who are sundered from one another by a less deep and less sharply cut 
psychological gulf than that which divides the transfronticr barbarians from the Power 
behind the limes. 

In the summer of a.d. 1914, for example, the outbreak of war in Europe was taken 
more tragically by the peoples of the West than it was by the Serbs—though the Serbs 
had only just emerged from two successive Balkan Wars and were being called upon, 
this time, to face, not just Turkey or Bulgaria, but the overwhelmingly superior power 
of Austria-Hungary. Vet the Serbs were less dismayed by the prospect of this third war 
against enormous odds than they were exhilarated by the hope of this time being able 
—at the price of a holocaust—to complete the achievement of their national aspirations. 

The same spirit had been displayed repeatedly by the Poles, who were culturally 
much closer akin than the Serbs were to the Western Europeans. During the Peace 
Conference of a.d. 19x9 a friend of the writer’s, Mr. Laurence Hammond, who was in 
Paris for the occasion as the special correspondent of the Manchester Guardian, was 
talking one day about the peace settlement to a member of the Polish Delegation with 
a baffling sense that they were speaking at cross purposes. His Polish interlocutor must 
have had the same feeling; for, in the middle of the conversation, he remarked on this 
to the following effect: ‘The truth is that you and I are approaching these questions from 
entirely different points of view. For you Westerners, as I have realized, the war that we 
have just been through has been a hideous and disastrous break in the peace which 
you have come to think of as being the normal condition of civilized life; and, in your 
ideas about a peace settlement, the paramount consideration in your minds is to avoid 
anything that might threaten to involve you in another catastrophe of the kind. If you 
could not persuade yourselves that this last war was "a war to end war”, you would hardly 
be able to face the future. We Poles look at things quite differently. For us. War, not 
Peace, is the normal condition of life. We have been through many wars before this 
last one, and we expect to have to go through many more; but this docs not dismay 
us, and it certainly does not deter us from pressing our national claims. If we get what 
we are asking for, I agree that this may well involve us in future wars with our neigh¬ 
bours; but, lor us, that is all in the day’s work. No doubt we shall again find ourselves 
at war; no doubt we shall again suffer catastrophes that would seem crushing to you 
English and French; and no doubt, in the next chapter of the story after that, there 
will still be a Poland on the map.’ 

1 See p. 26, n. 1, above. 



THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE 4 x 
be reduced because his forces will now be divided (and every enlisted 
barbarian will count twice over in this redistribution of man-power, 
since he will be leaving one warrior the less to Barbarism in bringing one 
soldier the more to Civilization). At the same time the unenlisted bar¬ 
barian’s temptation to plunder his civilized neighbours will be appreci¬ 
ably diminished. Economic distress in a poverty-stricken and hitherto 
over-populated ‘reservoir’ will be mitigated by an outflow of man-power 
into the imperial forces on the other side of the limes and a consequent 
inflow of remittances from these mercenary barbarian soldiers’ pay (a 
payment for services rendered which is decidedly preferable, from the 
Imperial Power’s point of view, to the humiliating subsidies or plunder¬ 
ings that are the only too familiar alternative ways of effecting a transfer 
of purchasing-power which, in some form or other, is inevitable). If 
nevertheless an insatiable cupidity should entice the non-enlistcd bar¬ 
barian warriors into reverting to their traditional malpractices, they will 
now find themselves confronted, no longer by citizen-soldiers with no 
stomach for fighting, but by barbarian mercenaries who may be expected 
to give a good account of themselves—not only because they enjoy fight¬ 
ing and thirst for the fame that is the non-material reward of barbarian 
military prowess, but also because they will now have property of their 
own, on the civilized side of the limes, to defend against the covetous 
hands of their still predatory kinsmen from beyond the pale. 

This impressive consensus of considerations had frequently led the 
rulers of universal states both to enlist transfronticr barbarian soldiers 
in their standing armies and to plant transfronticr barbarian settlers on 
the imperial side of the limes, in the marches or even in the interior. 
These would-be measures of imperial defence have been examined 
in other contexts, 1 and the details need not be recapitulated here. In 
this place we need only recall our previous finding 2 that this alluring 
expedient for averting a collapse of the limes actually precipitates the 
catastrophe which it is designed to forestall, and we may proceed to in¬ 
quire into the explanation of this apparent paradox. 

Part of the explanation is, of course, to be found in tire consideration 
that, in taking "the barbarians into its service, the Power behind the times 
is also taking them into its confidence and is thereby subjecting them to 
an intensive course of instruction in a military and political ‘know-how’ 
which they can afterwards employ, if they choose, to their own profit at 
their teachers’ expense. 

'It can be said of the Roman, Chinese, and British Indian empires 
alike that the method that worked best was one of enlisting the services 
of the very tribes that were supposedly excluded by the boundary, thus 
turning them about so that they faced away from the boundary- instead 
of toward it. .. . Nevertheless, it was a method that haunted the imperial 
state responsible for it, because it created a sword of two edges capable 
of striking outward when held in a strong hand but of cutting inward 
when the hand weakened. From border societies of this kind, linked with 
boundary-maintaining empires, were drawn the ‘‘barbarian auxiliaries” 

' In V. v. 4S9~8 o, especially pp. 4&0 and 464. and VI. vii. 335-8. See also Chadwick, 
H. M.: The Heroic Age (Cambridge 191a, University Press), p. 445. 

s On pp. 12-13, above. 

B 2808 .vm 


C 2 


42 HEROIC AGES 

of Rome and the "tributary barbarians” of China; from a similar society 
the British Empire in India recruits both regular troops and tribal levies. 
From the same societies came invaders and conquerors of both Rome and 
China; and the people of the same kind with whom the British now 1 
deal arc as dangerous as they arc useful.’ 2 

This last point is pertinently illustrated by a feature of the Waziristan 
campaign of a.d. 1919-20. 

‘The presence in Waziristan of not less than eighteen hundred fighting 
men—consisting of deserters from the two militia forces and ex-soldiers 
of the Indian Regular Army—who had received some form of British 
training had familiarised the tribesmen with the most modern tactics in 
rifle-fighting, and they now possessed sufficient stocks of ammunition to 
employ these tactics effectively.’ 2 

In the history of the Roman Empire’s long-drawn-out struggle to 
arrest an inexorable inclination of the scales in the transfrontier barbar¬ 
ians’ favour, a comparable policy of enlisting barbarians to keep their 
fellow barbarians at bay similarly defeated itself—if we are to believe a 
hostile critic of the Emperor Theodosius I’s administration—by initiat¬ 
ing the barbarians into the Roman art of war and at the same time appris¬ 
ing them of the Roman Empire’s weakness. 

‘In the Roman forces, discipline was now at an end, and all distinction 
between Roman and barbarian had broken down. The troops of both 
categories were all completely intermingled with one another in the 
ranks; for even the register of the soldiers borne on the strength of the 
military units was now no longer being kept up to date. The [barbarian] 
deserters [from the transfrontier barbarian war-bands to the Roman 
Imperial Army] thus found themselves free, after having been enrolled 
in Roman formations, to go home again and send off substitutes to take 
their place until, at their own good time, they might choose to resume 
their personal service under the Romans. This extreme disorganization 
that was thus now prevalent in the Roman military formations was no 
secret to the barbarians, since—with the door thrown wide open, as it 
had been, for intercourse—the deserters were able to give them full 
intelligence. The barbarians' conclusion was that the Roman body politic 
was being so grossly mismanaged as positively to invite attack.’ 4 

When such well-instructed mercenaries change sides en masse, it is no 
wonder that they arc often able to give the coup de grdee to a tottering 
Power behind the limes, which has enlisted their services as a last resort. 
But we have still to explain why they should be moved, as they so 
frequently are, to turn against their employers. When once they have 
been taken into the Imperial Power’s service, does not their personal 
interest coincide with their professional duty r The regular pay that they 
are now drawing from the Imperial Treasury is both more lucrative and 
more secure than the plunder that they used to snatch at the risk of their 
lives in occasional raids; the rich land assigned to them by the Imperial 

1 This passage was written in or before a.d. 1940.—A.J.T. 

1 Lattimore, O.: Inner Asian Frontiers of China (New York 1940, American Geo¬ 
graphical Society), pp. 245-6. 

1 Toynbee. A. J.: Survey of International Affairs, 1025. vol. i (London 1927, Milford), 
p. 557- 4 Zoaimus: Histonae, Book IV, chap, xxxi, §§ 1-3. 



THE ACCUMULATION OF PRESSURE 4 3 
authorities inside the limes is an equally advantageous exchange for the 
wretched land beyond the pale that was too poor to keep them alive if 
they did not eke out its scanty produce by lifting crops and cattle, on 
the civilized side of the limes, which are now theirs to enjoy by right. 
Does not this change in their fortunes give them a stake in the survival 
of the empire thanks to whose patronage the change has come about? If 
they turn against the masters whom they have contracted to serve on 
such favourable terms as these, are they not virtually inviting their kins¬ 
men who have stayed beyond the pale to scramble with them for benefits 
that remain their own monopoly so long as they keep the limes inviolate ? 
Why, then, turn traitor? Cui bono? 

The single answer to all these questions is that, in turning against the 
empire which he has been hired to defend, the barbarian mercenary 
is indeed acting against his own material interests, but that in doing this 
he is not doing anything peculiar. Man seldom behaves primarily as 
homo economicus, and the behaviour of a transfrontier barbarian in the 
service of the Power behind the limes is determined by an impulse that 
is stronger than any economic considerations. The governing factor in 
the situation is that the barbarian beyond the pale has long since become 
estranged from a broken-down neighbouring civilization. This moral 
breach between the two parties cannot be mended by a business deal— 
however profitable to both sides the bargain may be. An unreconciled 
estrangement will prevent the barbarian who has enlisted in the Im¬ 
perial Government’s service from being assimilated to the culture of 
the society which he has contracted to defend by force of arms; and, 
if enlistment will not lead to assimilation, the policy of enlistment cannot 
succeed. 

The truth is that, in enlisting the barbarian in its sendee, the Power 
behind the limes is attempting, under altogether unpropitious psycho¬ 
logical conditions, to recapture the relation between Barbarism and Civi¬ 
lization that prevailed in days when the civilization had not yet broken 
down and the limes had not yet come into existence. The defence of the 
civilization by an inner ring of barbarians against an outer ring of bar¬ 
barians was something that happened of itself, without any contract 
between the parties, so long as a growing civilization was attracting the 
barbarians by its charm. Under these psychological conditions an inner 
ring of barbarians served spontaneously both as a conductor through 
which the civilization radiated its cultural influence into barbarian 
societies at a farther remove and as a buffer which absorbed the shocks 
of these outer barbarians’ attempts to take by force 1 a cultural kingdom 
which, in its heyday, had for them the fascination of the Kingdom of 
Heaven. In these happy psychological circumstances the inner barbarian 
proselytes of one day became the cultural converts of the next, while 
today’s outer barbarian assailants became tomorrow’s inner barbarian 
proselytes. The growing civilization progressively extended its borders 
through the successive assimilation of one ring after another of its 
barbarian neighbours—a very different story from the subsequent 
history of a broken-down civilization’s expansion by force, up to the 

« Matt. xi. 12. 



44 HEROIC AGES 

limit to which sheer force could carry it, at the expense of barbarians 
whom it lias ceased to charm. 

The reason why, after the breakdown of the civilization and the 
erection of the times, the enlisted barbarians do not remain loyal is that, 
in the mercenary barbarian’s soul, his business contract with his 
civilized employer is not underwritten by any desire to share in the 
civilization which he has undertaken to defend in return for a material 
quid pro quo. The direction of the current of mimesis has indeed, as we 
have seen,* long since been reversed, and, so far from Civilization’s re¬ 
taining any prestige in the barbarian’s eyes, it is the barbarian who now 
enjoys prestige in the eyes of the representative of Civilization. 

‘Early Roman history has been described as the history of ordinary 
people doing extraordinary things. In the Later Empire it took an extra¬ 
ordinary man to do anything at all, except carry on a routine, and, as the 
Empire had for centuries devoted itself to the breeding and training of 
ordinary men, the extraordinary men of its last ages—Stilicho, Aetius, 
and their like—were increasingly drawn from the Barbarian World.’ 2 

While Stilicho was a barbarian, and an exceptionally loyal one, in the 
Roman Imperial service, Aetius was a barbarized Roman marchman; 3 
and it was not only in the Roman Empire in extremis that this assimilation 
of the marchman to the barbarian occurred. On the Central Asian times 
of the Han Empire and its avatars, ‘in entering "un-Chinese” terrain the 
Chinese had to modify or abandon their Chinese economy, thus weaken¬ 
ing their attachment to other Chinese’. 4 This reversal of the direction of 
the current of mimesis is fatal for a policy of enlisting Barbarism in 
Civilization’s defence. In these psychological circumstances a corps of 
barbarian foederati will never turn into a unit of the Imperial Regular 
Army; it will remain an unassimilated barbarian war-band retaining its 
own weapons and tactics, taking its orders from its own war-lord, feeling 
its own esprit de corps, nursing its own ambitions. In the same circum¬ 
stances a settlement of barbarian laeti 5 will never turn into a civil com¬ 
munity of imperial citizens; it will remain an unassimilated imperium in 
imperio which, short of being annihilated, will find its political destiny 
sooner or later in becoming the nucleus of a dissident successor-state. In 
short, the policy of hiring barbarians to keep their kinsmen out is fore¬ 
doomed to failure; and, as this expedient is the last forlorn hope of the 
tottering Power behind the limes, its failure is immediately followed by 
the times' collapse. 

1 In V. v. 459-80, and on pp. 14-15. above. 

1 Collingwood, R. G., in Collingwood, R. G., and Myres, J. N. L.: Roman Britain 
and the English Settlements, 2nd ed. (Oxford 1937, Clarendon Press), p. 307. 

> See the passage quoted from Lot in V. v. 472. 

* Lattimore, O.: Inner Asian Frontiers of China (New York 1940, American Geo¬ 
graphical Society), pp. 243-4. Cp. the passage already quoted on p. 14. above. 

* See VII. vi. 138-9. 



D. THE CATACLYSM AND ITS 
CONSEQUENCES 

A Reversal of Roles 

W HEN a barrage bursts, the whole body of water that has been 
gradually accumulating in the reservoirabovc the dam runs violently 
down a steep place into the sea 1 in the twinkling of an eye, and this 
sudden release of a long-pent-up and ever-mounting force produces a 
threefold catastrophe. In the first place the flood destroys the works of 
Man in the cultivated lands below the broken barrage. In the second 
place the potentially life-giving water that has made this devastating 
passage pours into the sea and becomes lost in the sea-water’s saline 
mass, without ever having served Man for his human purposes of irriga¬ 
tion or navigation or the generation of hydraulic power. In the third 
place the discharge of the accumulated waters empties the artificial lake 
above the barrage and leaves its margin high and dry, and this flight of 
the waters from above the dam dooms the exotic vegetation which had 
found an unexpected possibility of life at the stored-up water’s edge to 
wither away without propagating its kind on a mountain-side that has now 
relapsed into its pristine barrenness. In short, the waters which fructified 
so long as the barrage held, make havoc everywhere, in the lands that 
they lay bare as well as in those that they submerge, so soon as the burst¬ 
ing of the barrage releases them from the control which the existence of 
the barrage had imposed upon them. 

This episode in Man’s contest with Physical Nature is an apt simile 
of what happens in Man’s struggle with Human Nature, in his neigh¬ 
bours and in himself, upon the collapse of the military barrage of a limes. 
The resulting social cataclysm is a calamity for all concerned; but in the 
human, as in the physical, disaster the incidence of the devastation is 
unequal, and in this case likewise the distribution of the damage is the 
reverse of what might have been expected a priori. There is, in fact, here 
a paradoxical reversal of roles.® So long as the representatives of a 
disintegrating civilization were successful in saving a tottering limes from 
collapse, the tribulation which it cost them to perform this tour deforce 
was progressively aggravated, as we have seen, 1 out of all proportion to 
the progressive increase in the pressure exerted by the transfrontier 
barbarians. On the other hand, now that the disaster, so long dreaded 
and so long averted by the Power behind the limes, has at last duly 
descended upon the doomed civilization’s devoted head, the principal 
sufferers arc no longer the ex-subjects of the defunct universal state, over 
whose fields and cities the deluge of barbarian invasion now rolls 
unchecked, but the ostensibly triumphant barbarians themselves. The 
hour of their triumph, for which they have thirsted so long, proves to be 

« Matt. via. 32; Mark v. 13; Luke viii. 33. ..... . ... 

a The play of this ironical motif in human affairs—for which Aristotle coined the 
term wepurfrcia—has been discussed in IV. iv. 245-61. 

J On pp. 12, 25-26, and 39-40, above. 



46 HEROIC AGES 

the occasion of a discomfiture which neither they nor their defeated 
adversaries had foreseen. 

The Demoralization of the Barbarian Conquerors 

What is the explanation of this apparent paradox? The answer is that 
the limes, whose resistance the transfrontier barbarian has been seeking 
all the time to overcome, has served, not only as the bulwark of Civiliza¬ 
tion that its builders and defenders had intended it to provide against 
an outer Barbarism, but also as a providential safeguard for the aggressive 
barbarian himself against demonically self-destructive psychological 
forces within his own bosom. 

We have seen 1 that the proximity of a limes induces a malaise among 
the transfrontier barbarians within range of it because their previously 
primitive economy and institutions arc disintegrated by a rain of psychic 
energy, generated by the civilization within the limes, that is wafted 
across a barrier which is an obstacle to the fuller and more fruitful inter¬ 
course characteristic of the relations between a growing civilization and 
the primitive proselytes beyond its open and inviting timen. We have also 
seen 2 that, so long as the barbarian is confined beyond the pale, he 
succeeds in transmuting some, at least, of this disturbing influx of alien 
psychic energy into cultural products—political, artistic, and religious— 
which are partly adaptations of institutions created by the civilization 
from which the intrusive cultural influence comes, and partly new 
creations of the barbarian’s own. This capacity for adaptation and even 
creation, that is thus displayed by the barbarian while he is still beyond 
the pale, is a symptom that the psychological disturbance to which he is 
being exposed is being kept within bounds within which it can produce 
a partially stimulating and not wholly demoralizing effect; and this 
saving curb is provided by the existence of the very limes which the 
barbarian is bent on destroying; for the limes, so long as it holds, supplies 
a substitute, in some measure, for the indispensable discipline of which 
Primitive Man is deprived when the breaking of his cake of primitive 
custom 3 converts him into a transfronticr barbarian. This discipline is 
partly imposed on him externally; for, so long as the perennial.border 
warfare continues, the barbarian belligerent, whether his role be that of 
raider, hostage, or mercenary, is being trained continually perforce in a 
stern yet at the same time instructive military school; but the limes 
disciplines him most effectively in the psychological sense of giving him 
tasks to perform, objectives to reach, and difficulties to contend with 
that call forth his highest powers and constantly keep his efforts up to 
the mark. 

When the sudden collapse of the limes sweeps this safeguard away, the 
nascent creative powers that have been evoked in the transfrontier bar¬ 
barian by the challenge of the limes are daunted and defeated by being 
called upon, suddenly and prematurely, to perform new tasks that arc 
altogether too great and too difficult for them to cope with; and in this 
hour of bewilderment, when there is no more spirit in them, 4 these frail 

1 On pp. 4-9 and 35-39, above. _ * On pp. 9-1 r, above. 

J See the phrase quoted from Bagehot in II. i. 192. * 2 Chron. ix. 4. 



THE CATACLYSM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 47 
shoots of tender wheat are quickly stifled by the tares in the spiritual 
field of the barbarian’s soul—his abandon 1 and his ferocity—which find 
boundless opportunities for luxuriant growth now that the former raider 
and mercenary has entered into his long-coveted kingdom. If the trans¬ 
frontier barbarian is a more brutal, as well as a more sophisticated, being 
than his ancestor the primitive tribesman, the latter-day barbarian who 
has broken through the limes and carved a successor-state out of the 
derelict domain of a defunct universal state becomes differentiated from 
his already barbarian predecessor beyond the pale in the same two senses 
in a still higher degree. As soon as the barbarian has left no-man’s-land 
behind him and set foot in a ruined world which is for him an earthly 
paradise, his malaise rankles into demoralization. This demonic revolu¬ 
tion in the barbarian’s soul is illustrated by the spiritual catastrophe 
which overtook the Scandinavians when they overran the Carolingian 
Empire. 2 When, in the Viking Age, they tore their life up from its static 
primitive roots and launched it into pure adventure, the price of an 
excessive liberation was a fatal loss of balance. 1 


'When the King’s hall was transplanted into a foreign country and his 
luck plucked out of the fields and grazing grounds surrounding his manor, 
life necessarily became a round of battles and drinking feasts.’ 4 

In this exotic environment the barbarian’s previously manifest vices 
become flagrant, and his previously latent vices become manifest. 

For example, the tendency towards parasitism, 5 revealed in the bar¬ 
barian’s loss of grip upon the economic arts of peace through which his 
primitive forebears earned their livelihood, 6 is kept in check, so long as 
the limes stands, by the parasite’s finding himself compelled to pay by 
fighting—either as a raider or as a mercenary set to catch the thief that 
his brother has continued to be—for the living that he has ceased to 
earn by productive labour. But this last shred of economic respectability 
falls from the barbarian’s shoulders when his eventual acquisition of 
provinces which he has plundered or policed in the past gives him an 
effortless command over the wreckage of a civilization which, for him, 
still amounts to fabulous wealth. Hybrias the unchallenged master of a 
prostrate Minoan serfdom is a more odious parasite than Hybrias’ 
father, who had to snatch his booty or draw his pay from imperial Minos’ 
store at the cost of putting his own life in jeopardy. 

Again, the tendency towards sloth which the transfrontier barbarian 
already displays is, beyond the pale, likewise confined, as Tacitus 

1 The passive way of behaviour, produced by schism in the soul, which we have 
called abandon (alias aKparaa), has been discussed in V. v. 377 and 399-403. 

1 See II. ii. 340-60. 

3 Sec Grdnbcch. V.: Tht Culture of the Teutons (London 1931, Milford, 3 volt, in 
a), vol8. ii-iii, pp. 304 “ 5 * 

« Ibid., p. 305. . 

» A hermit-crab, which is the arch-panuite, is the antithesis of a chrysalis; and this 
contrast gives the measure of the Rulf between the barrenness of the External Prole¬ 
tariat and the creativity of the Internal Proletariat—considering that the role of chrysa¬ 
lis bridging the transition to an affiliated from an apparented civilization, which had 
sometimes been played by churches created by internal proletariats, proves not to 
have been more than an incidental deviation from a higher religion’s true calling (see 
VII. vii. 392-4 19 >. 

6 See pp. 35-381 above. 



48 HEROIC AGES 

observed, 1 to bouts of idleness spent in consuming a windfall acquired 
in the warrior’s latest raid or latest term of mercenary service; and the 
idler takes it for granted all the time that he will have to go on the war¬ 
path again as soon as his momentary gains have been spent—whereas the 
barbarian master of a successor-state feels himself dispensed from living 
from hand to mouth and joyfully lapses into vegetating as a boorish 
sybarite, with no forebodings of a day of judgement on which the strong 
man z who has thus heedlessly laid aside his arms may be despoiled of 
his ill-gotten goods by a stronger than he—as the Vandals were over¬ 
taken by a Roman revanche and the Visigoths by the swoop of fellow 
barbarian Arab raiders who had not yet had time, since their passage of 
the Roman Empire’s Syrian limes, to tread the barbarian conqueror’s 
demoralizing road all the way to its miserable journey’s end. The alter¬ 
native route to the same dismal goal is the even less romantic path that 
was trodden by the Kassites and the Merovingians, who were denied the 
comparatively honourable exit of a violent death in order to be sentenced 
in the bankruptcy court of History when they had run through the 
wasting assets of a civilization which had already gone into disintegration 
before they had arrived on the scene to speed the course of its ruin by 
making a bonfire out of a dead society’s derelict social heritage. 

In whichever of these two alternative ways they meet their end, 3 the 
barbarians in partibus civilium cast themselves, as we have observed by 
anticipation, 4 for the sordid role of vultures feeding on carrion or mag¬ 
gots crawling in a carcass; and it has been noticed by Ibn Khaldun that 
they are apt to display a most unheroic prudence in keeping at a safe 
distance from their dying victim’s body until the life has so far gone out 
of him that there is no danger any longer of his being able to offer any 
resistance. 

‘[The future founders of a successor-state] give way to baseless fears 
whenever they hear talk of the [flourishing] state of the existing empire and 
of the vast resources that it has at its command. This is enough to deter 
them from attacking it, and so their chief is obliged to have patience and 
to bide his time. But, when the empire has fallen into complete decadence, 
as invariably happens, and when its military and financial strength has 
suffered mortal injuries, this chief is rewarded for having waited so long by 
now finding himself able to take advantage of the opportunity of conquer¬ 
ing the empire. . . . When the will of God has made itself manifest, and 
the old empire is on the point of collapse, after haying reached the term 
of its existence, and has become disorganised in all its parts, its feebleness 
and exhaustion attract its adversary’s notice. . . . Encouraged by this 
discovery, the people of the new empire prepare with one accord to open 
the attack; the imaginary dangers that had shaken their resolution up to 
that moment now disappear, the period of waiting comes to an end, and 
the conquest is accomplished by force of arms.’* 

1 In the passage quoted on p. 37, n. 2, above. 

1 Luke xi. 21-22; cp. Matt. xii. 29; Mark iii. 27. 

J These alternative endings of the barbarians' adventures have been touched upon 
in I. i. 58-59 and in IV. iv. 4S4-6, and are surveyed at greater length at the close of the 
present chapter. • In I. i. 62. 

* Ibn Khaldun: MuqaddamSt, translated by de Slane, Baron McG. (Paris 1863-8, 
Imprimeric Iinpdriale, 3 vols.), vol. ii, pp. 134-5. 



THE CATACLYSM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 49 

As examples of this circumspect method of ‘conquering’ a moribund 
universal state, Ibn Khaldun cites the eviction of the Umayyads by the 
'Abbasids; the supplanting of the 'Abbasids in their turn by the Tabari 
'Alids in Daylam and by the Daylamis in the two ‘Ir 5 qs and in Fare; the 
eviction of the ‘Abbasids’ local successors in Egypt by the Kat 5 ma 
Berbers (‘the Fatimids’), of the Ghaznawids by the Saljuq Turks, and of 
the last of the ‘Abbasids and their supplanters east of the Euphrates by 
the Mongols, who, as he points out, took forty years (a.d. 1220-60) to 
build their empire up; the eviction of the Far Western Umayyads’ 
successors by the Lamtuna Berbers (the MurSbits), of the Lamtuna 
by the Masmuda (the Muwahhids), and of the Masmuda by the ZanSta 
(the Marauds). 1 After presenting his readers with this survey, Ibn 
Khaldun anticipates a pious Muslim’s objection that the Primitive 
Muslim Arabs’ conquest of the Romans and the Sasanidac was a genuine 
—and tremendous—feat of arms, and he concedes that this is a miracu¬ 
lous exception of the kind that proves a rule. A more sceptical student of 
this at first sight astonishing achievement may be inclined to question 
whether Ibn Khaldun need have feared that it might seem to invalidate 
his thesis; for, when all allowance has been made for the tlan of a 
Khalid b. Walid, a satisfactory and sufficient explanation of the rapidity 
and ease of the Arab conquests is to be found in the fact that, immediately 
before the Arabs’ eruption, the Roman and Sasanian empires had bled 
one another white and fought one another to a standstill in the inter¬ 
necine wars of a . d . 572-91 and a . d . 603-28, and that the Monophysite 
Christian subjects of the Roman Empire south of the Taurus were at 
least as deeply alienated from their ‘Mclchitc’ Orthodox Christian rulers 
as the Nestorian Christian subjects of the Sasanian Empire in ‘Iraq were 
from their Zoroastrian rulers. 

If the parasitism and the idleness already displayed by the barbarian 
while still beyond the pale are apt to luxuriate as soon as the collapse of a 
moribund universal state’s last pouxrs of resistance removes the last 
check on this cautiously predatory scavenger’s perpetual temptation to 
take his ease, other vices, previously latent, become flagrantly manifest 
in the barbarian as soon as he brings upon himself, by breaking through 
the limes, the fantastic experience of ‘Alice through the Looking Glass’. 
The origin of this revolting array of moral disorders is to be found in 
a sudden emancipation for which the victim-beneficiary is morally un¬ 
prepared. Liberation from the restraint imposed by the existence of the 
limes, and of the Power behind it, is as demoralizing for the barbarian as, 
in the would-be civilized society that he overruns, is an adolescent’s 
escape from the control of parents and pedagogues before the creature 
has acquired the will or power to attempt to control itself. 

‘The qualities exhibited by these societies, virtues and defects alike, 
arc clearly those of adolescence_The characteristic feature ... is eman¬ 

cipation—social, political, and religious—from the bonds of tribal law. 

. . . The characteristics of heroic ages in general are those neither of 
infancy nor of maturity. . . . The typical man of the Heroic Age is to be 
compared rather with a youth. . . . For a true analogy we must turn to 

« Ibid., pp. 135 - 7 - 



5 o HEROIC AGES 

the case of a youth who has outgrown both the ideas and the control of 
his parents—such a case as may be found among the sons of un¬ 
sophisticated parents who through outside influence, at school or else¬ 
where, have acquired knowledge which places them in a position of 
superiority to their surroundings.’ 1 

The latent weakness of the abruptly emancipated adolescent comes 
out conspicuously on the social and political plane. As we have noticed 
already, 2 

‘in social organisation the distinguishing feature of the Heroic Age is in 
the nature of a revolt or emancipation from those tribal obligations and 
ideas by which the society of primitive peoples is everywhere governed. 
The same remark applies in principle to political organisation: the 
princes of the Heroic Age appear to have freed themselves to a large 
extent from any public control on the part of the tribe or community. 
The changes which we have noted in Religion have a similar tendency. 
Tribal ideas give way to universalism both in the cult of higher powers 
and in the conception of immortality; and in both the Teutonic and Greek 
heroic ages these changes seem to be associated with a weakening in the 
force of Religion.... It will be seen that the emancipation of which we are 
speaking is partly of an intellectual character. This applies both to Reli¬ 
gion and to those ideas which govern social relations. On the other hand 
it is also partly in the nature of a freedom from outside control, both in 
social relations and in government. The force formerly exercised by the 
kindred is now largely transferred to the comitatus, a body of chosen ad¬ 
herents pledged to personal loyalty to their chief. So also, in government, 
the council of the tribe or community has come to be nothing more than 
a comitatus or court. The result of the change is that the man who pos¬ 
sesses a comitatus becomes largely free from the control of his kindred, 
while the chief similarly becomes free from control within his community.’ 3 

The Bankruptcy of a Fallen Civilized Empire's Barbarian Successor- 
states. 

On the barbarian’s native heath beyond the pale, this social and 
political revolution wears the aspect of an act of creation opportunely 
filling a vacuum produced by the disintegration of primitive institutions 
under the corroding influence of the civilization behind the limes; and 
in this relatively simple social environment the new* regime duly serves 
its turn well enough sometimes to move the statesmen of the adjoining 
universal state to utilize it for their own purpose of transforming a 
no-man’s-land into a glacis for a Festung-OikoumenS. The capacity of a 
barbarian war-lord and his comitatus to perform, on occasion, the ser¬ 
vice of providing a buffer-state for a universal state in the last phase of 
its history was demonstrated in the histories of the Ghassanid Arab 
principality, covering the Syrian desert frontier of the Roman Empire, 4 

' Chadwick, H. M.: The Heroic Age (Cambridge 1912, University Press), pp. 442-4. 

J On pp. 10 and 38, above. * Chadwick, op. cit., p. 443. 

* 'L’empercur Icur confcra 1 c titre dc patricc, qui les hissait au sommet de la 
hi^rarchie byxantine. J1 cr*a pour cux la dignity de phylarche ou commandant dcs tribus. 
C’itait rattacher au phylarcat gassanide tous les Bidouins. places sous la mouvance plus 
ou moins dircctc de l’cmpirc, cn Syric ct dans les ddserts limitrophes. Reprdsentants 
officiels de Cdsar auprds dc leurs compatriotes, les dmira assumaient la surveillance du 
limes, de la frontiers syro-palestinienne. 11s devaient favoriscr la pdndtration dc l’in- 



THE CATACLYSM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 51 
and its counterpart and adversary the Lakhmid Arab principality, 
covering the 'Ir 3 qi desert frontier of the Sasanian Empire, during the 
last hundred years before both these buffer-states were swept away by 
the Primitive Muslim Arabs’ onslaught 1 on the imperial Powers whom 
the Ghasspids and the Lakhmids had served so well for so long. 1 The 
same tale is told by the history of the Salian Frankish guardians of the 
Roman Empire’s Lower Rhenish frontier during the century following 
their plantation in Toxandria as dediticii by the Emperor Julian in 
a.d. 358 ; 3 and the principality of Afghanistan served the British Indian 
Empire in a similar capacity during the forty years a.d. 1879-1919. 

fluencc romaine, derriire !n ligne de fortins et dc castella, tendue depuis le Nord de la 
Palmyrene jusque vers Aila, pour protfger !es agglomerations de s^dentaires. Cette 
institution du phylarcat gassSnide, mdcanisme souple et peu coflteux, fut une dcs plus 
hcureuscs inspirations dc la penftration pacifique. Elle garantissait A la fois la sfcuritd 
des frontiires, 1c prestige de l’Empire, tout en minageant l'amour-propre ombrageux 
des Bedouins' (Lammens, S.J., Pire H.: La Mecque d la Vrills de I'H/gire (Bayrut 
1924, Imprimerie Catholique), p. 244). 

1 The Muslim Arab conquerors found the two Christian march states themselves 
less difficult to liquidate than the historic feud between them. In the civil war between 
'Ali and Mu'awiyah which followed close on the heels of the conquest (see the present 
chapter, p. 64, below), 'All, from his capital at Kufah, was playing the prince of Hijah's 
traditional part, and Mu'awiyah, from his capital at Damascus, the Ghassanid phy- 
larch’s (sec VI. vii. 131, n. 3). 

* The Roman Empire’s Ghassanid Arab march was organized by the Emperor Jus¬ 
tinian circa a.d. 530-1, and, according to Lammens, op. cit., pp. 244-5 this initiative 
on the Roman Imperial Government’s part led the Sasanian imperial Government to 
confer a corresponding status on its own Arab prot^gfs and political agents, the Lakh¬ 
mids. This change in the Lakhmids’ position seems to have been formal rather than 
substantial, since, dt facto, the Lakhmids had already been serving as the wardens of 
the Sasanids’ desert march, and this going concern was no doubt the model which ’ 
Justinian had before his eyes when he created his own Ghassanid phylarchy. According 
to de Lacy O'Leary, Arabia before Muhammad (London 1927, Kegan Paul), p. 155, 
the Lakhmids had been the Sasanids’ Arab agents since the time of the second Sasanian 
emperor, Shapur I {accentt a.D. 241). During the decadence of the foregoing Parthian 
Arsacid regime which the Persian Sasanidae had now swept away, there had been an 
infiltration of Nomad Arabs, not only into the North Mesopotamian Steppe, but into 
the cultivated lands in 'Iraq, and the newly established Sasanian Power found itself 
confronted with the task of reducing these interlopers to order. When Shapur I in¬ 
herited this formidable task from his father Ardeshir I, the founder of the Sasanian 
Empire, he forbore to carry out to the bitter end the policy of subjugating these recal¬ 
citrant Arabs within his frontier* by force of arms, and resorted to the alternative policy 
of indirect rule through an Arab deputy—a compromise which vindicated the Sasanian 
Imperial Government’s suzerainty without depriving the Arabs of their autonomy. 
The deputy whom Shapur I appointed was the Lakhmid *Amr b. 'Adi, and this appoint¬ 
ment was the origin of the Sasanian Arab march with its administrative centre at Hirah. 
This Sasanian march, like its Roman counterpart, was still in existence at the time of the 
Muslim Arab conquest, though the Lakhmid dynasty had been deposed by the Sasanian 
Emperor Khusru II Parwiz. According to O’Leary’, op. cit., pp. x6o-r, the last of the 
Lakhmid princes of Hirah, a Nu'man, fled to the desert, for fear of the Sasanian 
Government’s hostility, in A.D. 605, and returned and was put to death by Parwiz 
circa a.d. 620 [sic]. After putting Nu'man to death, Parwiz replaced him on the throne of 
Hirah by Iyas of the tribe of Tayy, and then, after Ivas' death, annexed Hirah, in A.D. 
614 [sic], to the territories under the Sasanian Crown a direct administration. According 
to Christensen, A.: Iran sous let Sananidet (Copenhagen 1936, Levin & Munkegaard), 
p. 447, the date at which Nu'man was put to death by Parwiz was some time between 

A l j’ 'f hough SaHan'prankish war-bands under Merovingian leadership began, as early as 
the fifth decade of the fifth century, to encroach upon Roman Imperial domain-land* 
in Northern Gaul beyond the limits of the territory originally assigned to them by the 
Roman authorities, another Salian war-lord, Clogio, was defeated by AJtius at Vicus 
Helena (Helcsmcs) in an attempt to seize Cambrai. The diplomatic Roman victor re¬ 
warded the defeated Salians for their misdemeanours by allowing them to retain the 
conquests that they had made up to that point, and by raising their status from that 
of dediticii (who, at least in theory, were required to do their military service for 
the Empire as regular soldiers enrolled in units of the Imperial Army) to the status of 



52 HEROIC AGES 

These examples show that a barbarian military monarchy may prove 
equal to the task of holding the wardenship of a march, against its fellow 
barbarians beyond the pale, under a universal state’s auspices. But the 
fates of the successor-states established by barbarian conquerors in the 
interior of an extinct universal state’s former domain show still more 
clearly that this equivocal achievement of a jejune barbarian political 
genius is quite unequal to the task of bearing burdens and solving 
problems that are thrown upon it because they have proved too much 
for the statesmanship of an oecumenical Power that has been heir to the 
cumulative political experience of an entire civilization. How, indeed, 
could a challenge that has defeated the efforts of even a broken-down 
civilization be expected to receive a victorious response from barbarian 
interlopers? If the god Helios himself had lost command of his fiery 
steeds, the catastrophic outcome of a mortal Phacthon’s audacious en¬ 
deavour to stay the hazardous course would have been doubly inevitable. 

A barbarian successor-state blindly goes into business on the strength 
of the dishonoured credits of a universal state that has already gone into 
bankruptcy; and these boors in office hasten the advent of their in¬ 
evitable doom by a self-betrayal through the outbreak, under stress of 
a moral ordeal, of something fatally false within; 1 for a polity based 
solely on a gang of armed desperados’ fickle loyalty to an irresponsible 
military leader, 2 while it may be adequate for the organization of a raid 
or, at a pinch, for the administration and defence of a march, is morally 
unfit for the government of a community that has made even an un¬ 
successful attempt at civilization. 3 It is far more unfit than would have 
been the unsophisticated yet respectable primitive rule of custom in¬ 
terpreted by the living elders of the tribe 4 into whose swept and gar- 


foederati (whose privilege il was to serve in national units of their own). Under this new 
arrangement the Salians duly fought on the Roman side against Attila at the Campus 
Mauriacus in A.D. 451: quondam militet Romani, tunc vtro iam in numero auxiliarium 
exquisiti (Jordancs: Getiea, 191). After Aitius's death in a . d . 454 Clogio took Cambrai 
and advanced to the Somme, but the Imperial Government's authority was once again 
established over the foederati in Gaul by the Emperor Majorian ( imperabat a . d . 457-61), 
and thereafter the Salians continued, at least formally, to recognize the authority of 
Aegidius, Majorian's magister miUtum per Galliot, who held on at Soissons after Ma- 
jorian's assassination. It was not till A.D. 486/7, when Merovech’s grandson Clovis 
(Chlodovcch) attacked and overthrew Aegidius’s successor Syagrius, that the Mero¬ 
vingian buffer-state of the Roman Empire openly asserted its independence (see 
Schmidt, L.: ‘Aus den Anfangcn dcs Salfrankischcn KOnigtums’, in Klio, vol. xxxiv, 
pp. 306-27). 

1 Meredith, George, quoted in IV. iv. 120 and VI. vii. 46. 

* 'Irresponsible power, uncontrolled by any settled traditions of ordered freedom, 
will often assert itself or defend itself by savage cruelty. The catalogue of such enormities 
is too long and monotonous to be told in detail’ (Dill, S.: Roman Society in Gaul in 
the Merovingian Age (London 1926, Macmillan), p. 133, introducing an anthology of 
Merovingian atrocities). 

1 The failure of the barbarian successor-states of a fallen civilized empire to carry 
out their self-imposed mandate is the more signal, considering that they arc ant, at their 
inauguration, to be presented with the invaluable unearned asset of a fund of good will 
in the hearts of their newly acquired civilized subjects. These cx-citizens of a fallen 
universal state are so utterly disillusioned with the decadent imperial rdgime from whose 
incompetence and corruption they and their forebears have suffered for many genera¬ 
tions past, that they are inclined to greet even a barbarian alternative regime as a wel¬ 
come alleviation. See Orosius: Historiae Advertum Paganot, Book VII, chap, xli, $ 7, 
and Salvian: De Gubernatione Dei, Book V, §§ 21-22 and 36-37, quoted by E. M. Pick- 
man in The Mind of Latin Christendom (London 1937, Oxford University Press), pp. 
* 73 - 4 - 4 See II. i. 191-2. 



THE CATACLYSM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 53 
nished house' this gangster-constitution has forced its entry since the 
radiation of a disintegrating civilization has perverted that decadent 
society’s once primitive neighbours into bands of adolescent barbarians. 2 

When these barbarian war-bands have entered into their kingdom in 
the former domain of a fallen universal state, the dissolution of the 
primitive kin-group in the barbarian comitatus is swiftly followed by the 
dissolution of the comitatus itself in the alien subject population. 

‘The Arabs who have settled in . . . regions which afford rich pastures 
for their flocks, and which provide everything required for making life 
agreeable, have allowed the purity of their race to be corrupted by mar¬ 
riages with foreign families. This has been the history of the Lakhm, the 
Judhilm, the Ghassin, the Tayy, the Khuza'ah, the Ayyad and the other 
tribes descended from Himyar and Kahlan. . . . The Caliph Umar said: 
“Learn your genealogies, and do not be like the Nabataeans [settled 
Arabs] of As-Sawad [the alluvial,plain of *Ir 3 q]; when one asks one of 
them where he comes from, he answers: From such and such a village." 
But the Arabs established in fertile countries with fat pastures found 
themselves in contact with other peoples, and this led to an intermingling 
of race and blood. Indeed, from the first days of Islam, people began 
to name the [interloping Arab] tribes after the countries of which they 
were in occupation. People spoke, for example, of the jund [cantonment] 
of Qinnasrin, the jund of Damascus, the jund of the ‘AwSsim. The same 
usage made its way into Andalusia. The Arabs had not, as a matter of fact, 
renounced the custom of calling themselves by the name of the tribe to 
which they belonged; they were merely adopting an additional surname, 
in order to make it easier for their war-lords to distinguish them. There¬ 
after, [however,] they mixed with the inhabitants of the towns—people 
mostly of foreign race—and in this way they lost their purity of blood 
entirely. From that time onwards, family ties became so weak among them 
that they lost their sense of nationality. . . . Next, the tribes themselves 
became extinct, and their liquidation brought with it the disappearance 
of all esprit de corps'* 

The Restraining Influences of Aid 6 s, Nemesis, and Hiltn. 

The barbarian trespassers in partibus civi/ium have, in fact, con¬ 
demned themselves to suffer a moral breakdown as an inevitable con¬ 
sequence of their own adventurous act. 4 Yet they do not yield to their 


« Matt. xii. 44; Luke xi. 25. ...... 

‘ The moral inferiority of the adolescent harbanan to his primitive predecessor has 
been pointed gut by H. G. Wells in The Outline of History (London 1920, Cassell), 
p. 29S, in a passage which is a fine example of his intuitive genius. (In order to transpose 
this passage into the terminology of the present Study, Wells' term ‘barbarism’ has, of 
course, to be construed as ‘primitive life', and his term ‘savage’ as 'primitive .) 

‘It is frequently said that Europe in the sixth and seventh centuries relapsed into 
barbarism, but that does not express the reality of the case very well. Barbarism is a 
social order of an elementary type, orderly within its limits; the state of Europe beneath 
its political fragmentation was a social disorder. Its moral was not that of a kraal, but 
that of a slum. In a savage kraal a savage knows that he belongs to a community , and 
lives and acts accordingly; in a slum the individual neither knows of, nor acts in relation 
to, any greater being.’ „ 

1 Ibn Khaldun: Muqaddtmdt, translated by de Slanc, Baron McG. (Pans 1863-8, 
Imprimeric Imp<riale, 3 vols.), vol. i, pp. 271-3* , , , . . 

* Ibn KhaldOn traces the stages of this demoralization with a masterly hand, and 
with a wealth of illustrations from the histories of Arab and Berber barbanan inter¬ 
lopers, in op. cit., vol. i, especially pp. 292-7 and 342 - 59 * 



54 HEROIC AGES 

self-decreed doom without a spiritual struggle that has left its traces in 
their literary records of myth and ritual and standards of conduct. 

The barbarians’ ubiquitous master-myth describes the hero’s vic¬ 
torious fight with a monster for the acquisition of a treasure which the 
unearthly enemy is withholding from Mankind in order to devour it or 
to hoard it for his own bestial satisfaction. This is the common motif of 
the tales of Beowulf’s fight with Grcndel and Grendel’s mother; Sieg¬ 
fried’s fight with the dragon; Perseus’ feat of slaying and decapitating 
a gorgon the sight of whose head would have turned him to stone if he 
had not skilfully avoided setting eyes on it, and his subsequent feat of 
winning Andromeda for his bride by slaying the sea-monster who was 
threatening to devour her. The motif reappears in Jason’s outmanoeuv¬ 
ring of the serpent-guardian of the Golden Fleece and in Herakles’ 
kidnapping of Cerberus. This myth looks like a projection, on to the 
outer world, of a psychological struggle, in the barbarian’s own soul, 
for the rescue of Man’s supreme spiritual treasure, his rational will, from 
a demonic spiritual force released in the abyss of the unconscious depths 
of the Psyche by the shattering experience of passing, at one step, from 
a familiar no-man’s-land outside the limes into the enchanted world laid 
open by the barrier’s collapse. The myth may indeed be a translation 
into literary narrative of a ritual act of exorcism in which a militarily 
triumphant but spiritually afflicted barbarian has attempted to find a 
practical remedy for his devastating psychological malady . 1 

In the emergence of special standards of conduct applicable to the 
peculiar circumstances of an heroic age we can see a further attempt, 
from another line of approach, to set moral bounds to the ravages of a 
demon that has been let loose in the souls of the barbarian lords and 
masters of a prostrate civilization by the fall of the material barrier of 
the limes. Conspicuous examples are the Achaeans’ Homeric Aid 6 s and 
Nemesis (‘Shame’ and ‘Indignation’) and the Umayyads’ historic Hilrn 
(a studied Self-Restraint). 

‘The great characteristic of [Aid 6 s and Nemesis], as of Honour generally, 
is that they only come into operation when a man is free: when there is 
no compulsion. If you take people . . . who have broken away from all 
their old sanctions and select among them some strong and turbulent 
chief who fears no one, you will first think that such a man is free to do 
whatever enters his head. And then, as a matter of fact, you find that, 
amid his lawlessness, there will crop up some possible action which some¬ 
how makes him feel uncomfortable. If he has done it, he "rues” the deed 
and is haunted by it. If he has not done it, he "shrinks” from doing it. 
And tin’s, not because anyone forces him, nor yet because any particular 
result will accrue to him afterwards, but simply because he feels aidds ... .* 

‘Aid 6 s is what you feel about an act of your own; Nemesis is what you 

1 This fascinating subject has been explored by Gustav Hdbener in a series of studies: 
England und die Gesitttmgsgrundlage der EurofSitchen Fruhgeschichte (Frankfurt am 
Main 1930); ‘Der Heroischc Exorzismus der Nordischcn Rasse und der Winckelried- 
sagenkreia am Vierwaldstattersec’, in Gcmanisch-Romanische Monattschrift, 1931; 
‘Beowulf and German Exorcism’, in Rniete of English Studies, vol. xi, No. 42 , 1935; 
‘Beowulf's "Scax", the Saxons, and an Indian Exorcism’, ibid., vol. xii. No. 48. 1930. 

* It will be seen that, in H. G. Wells’ terms (see the passage quoted on p. 53, n. 2, 
above), Aid6s is essentially a virtue of ‘a slum’ in which ’the individual neither knows 
of, nor acts in relation to, any greater being.’—A.J.T. 



THE CATACLYSM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 55 

feel for the act of another. Or, most often, it is what you imagine that 
others will feel about you. . . . But suppose no one sees. The act, as you 
know well, remains venecijrov—a thing to feel nemesis about: only there 
is no one there to feel it. Yet, if you yourself dislike what you have done, 
and feel aid 6 s for it, you inevitably are conscious that somebody or some¬ 
thing dislikes or disapproves of you-The Earth, Water, and Air [are] 

full of living eyes: of them, of daimones, of ktres. .. . And it is they who 
have seen you and are wroth with you for the thing which you have done.' 1 

In a post-Minoan heroic age, as depicted in the Homeric Epic, the 
actions that evoke feelings of AMs and Nemesis are those implying 
cowardice, lying, and perjury, lack of reverence, and cruelty or treachery 
towards the helpless. 2 

'Apart from any question of wrong acts done to them, there are certain 
classes of people more alBoioi, objects of aidOs, than others. There are 
people in whose presence a man feels shame, self-consciousness, awe, a 
sense keener than usual of the importance of behaving well. And what sort 
of people chiefly excite this aMs? Of course there arc kings, elders and 
sages, princes and ambassadors: alSotoi fiaoiAfjts, ylpovres, and the like: 
all of them people for whom you naturally feel reverence, and whose 
good or bad opinion is important in the World. Yet.. . you will find that 
it is not these people, but quite others, who arc most deeply charged, as it 
were, with AMs— before whom you feel still more keenly conscious of 
your unworthiness, and whose good or ill opinion weighs somehow in¬ 
explicably more in the last account: the disinherited of the Earth, the 
injured, the helpless, and, among them the most utterly helpless of all, 
the dead.’ 1 

In contrast to AMs and Nemesis, which enter into all aspects of 
social life, Hibn is a vertu des politiques * Before the inauguration of 
Islam the practice of Hibn had been learnt by Abu Sufy 3 n, the father 
of a Mu'awiyah who was to found the Umayyad Power, in the school 
of the mercantile republic of Mecca: 5 a cultural as well as physical oasis 
in the desert of Arab barbarism where the rudiments of city-state life 
had been propagated by a radiation of Syriac and Hellenic influences 
which, at earlier dates, had produced more brilliant fruits of the kind 
at Palmyra and at Petra. 6 Abu SufySn’s son the Caliph Mu'awiyah I 
claimed that Hilm was an Umayyad family virtue, 7 and Mu'awiyah 
himself came to figure as the classical exponent of it. 8 One of Mu'awiyah’s 
dicta was that ‘ Hibn would be universal if everyone had Abu Sufyan 
for his ancestor ’P But ‘the qualities which, when found in combination, 
the Arabs designated by the name of Hilm' were ‘as rarely met with as 


» Murray, Gilbert: The Rise of the Greek Epic, 3rd ed. (Oxford 1924. Clarendon 

a Ibidl^ pp. 85-87. * Ibid., pp. 87-88. 

* Lammens. S.J., Pire H.: litudet sur le Regne du Calife Omoxyade Mo'&eia !•' 

S .yrflt 1908, Imprimerie Catholique; Paris 1908, Gcuthner), p. 81, n. 2. The quotations 
m this book have been made with the permission of the publishers, 
s See Lammens, op. cit., p. 89. 6 See I. i. 74, n. 4. and II. 11. 9-12. 

1 See Lammens, op. tit., p. 88, n. 3. . . 

» See Lammens, op. cit, pp. 66-67. A monograph entitled 7 /tf Ihlm of Mu dtciyah 
is one of the lost works of the Classical Arabic Literature (Lammens, op. cit., p. 89), 
but Lammens has collected anecdotes on the subject, from surviving works, in op. cit. 



S 6 HEROIC AGES 

they were highly prized among a passionate people whose temperament 
was a bundle of nerves—nerves almost showing through the skin and 
reacting to the slightest external shock’. 1 

'Hilm is neither patience nor moderation nor clemency nor long-suffer¬ 
ing nor self-possession nor maturity of character. It merely borrows from 
each of these qualities certain external traits, to an extent just sufficient 
to take in an observer who is not on the alert. The product of these super¬ 
ficial loans is a virtue that is specifically Arab.’* 

Hilm is thus something more sophisticated than AidSs and Nemesis, 
and consequently also something less attractive. Hilm is emphatically 
not an expression of humility; ‘its aim is rather to humiliate an adver¬ 
sary : to confound him by presenting the contrast of one’s own superior¬ 
ity; to surprise him by displaying the dignity and calm of one’s own 
attitude’. 1 The practice of Hilm is not incompatible with inward feelings 
of resentment, animus, and vindictiveness. 4 Hilm is not within the 
competence of anyone who is not rich and powerful, and it presupposes 
not only the possession of power but the possibility of abusing it in 
order to injure one’s neighbour without having to fear the consequences 
of one’s action. 5 

‘In the desert, every true “gentleman” must have in his moral coach¬ 
house (remise) —or, as wc are tempted to say, in his moral stable (tcurie )— 
two steeds to choose between at his pleasure. On the one, he makes a 
parade of clemency. The other—and this is the one which he prefers to 
mount—allows him to show himself in his true colours. . . . 6 

‘At bottom, Hilm, like most Arab qualities, is a virtue for bravado and 
display, with more ostentation in it than real substance: one form of 
Nomad stoicism—a stoicism tinged with pharisaism. Among a theatrical 
people that is the devitalised heir of a race which has been initiated into 
civilisation at a very early date, but which has since relapsed into the state 
of nature, a reputation for Hilm can be acquired at the cheap price of an 
elegant gesture or a sonorous mot: it does not pre-suppose a serious 
spiritual struggle against angry passions, against pride, or against the 
desire for vengeance. It can be combined with brutality in daily life . . . 7 

‘In reality Hilm (as Ahnaf has remarked with profound insight) was not 
so much a virtue as an attitude—a prudent opportunism serving as a safe¬ 
guard against abuses of authority, which are always regrettable, under a 
regime which in principle was democratic; opportune above all in an 
anarchic milieu, such as the Arab Society was, where every act of violence 
remorselessly provoked a retaliation. It was no feeling of humanity, but 
a fear of the thar (emeute), that inspired the Badawi with a horror of blood¬ 
shed. And thus the virtue of Hilm was revealed to him by the disagree¬ 
ableness of the consequences of a passionate word or gesture. From this 
point of view , Hilm was something that could not be ignored by the chiefs, 
who were obliged by their situation to maintain an equilibrium between 
the elements of disorder that were rife within the bosom of the tribe. 
Given the parliamentary institutions [of the Arab heroic age], Hilm 
became, for the depositary of [political] power, a virtue of the first 
order.. . . s 

1 Lammens, op. cit., p. 69. * Ibid., p. 67. 

3 Ibid., p. 68. ♦ See ibid., p. 69. 

5 See ibid., pp. 72 and 79. * Ibid., p. 76. 

7 Ibid., p. 81. • * Ibid., p. 87. 



THE CATACLYSM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 57 

'Hilm, as practised by [Mu'SwIyah’s Umayyad successors], facilitated 
their task of giving the Arabs a political education; it sweetened for their 
pupils the bitterness of having to sacrifice the anarchic liberty of the Desert 
in favour of sovereigns who were condescending enough to draw a velvet 
glove over the iron hand with which they ruled their empire.’ 1 

These acute characterizations of the nature of Hilm, Aid 6 s, and Nemesis 
from the masterly hands of sensitive students of the surviving records 
show how nicely adapted these standards of conduct are to the peculiar 
political, social, and psychological circumstances of the Heroic Age; and, 
if, as we have intimated already, the Heroic Age is intrinsically ‘a tran¬ 
sient phase’, 1 the surest sign of its advent and its recession are the 
epiphany and the eclipse of ideals that are its specific attendant moral 
luminaries. Stars whose faint but precious glimmer through the evening 
twilight has been the only consolation for the setting of the Sun cease 
to be visible in the darkness before dawn, 

‘and then, at long last, shall those spirits go their way to Olympus from 
the wide-wayed Earth, with their beautiful faces veiled in white raiment, 
seeking the company of the immortals and leaving behind them the com¬ 
pany of men—even the spirits of Shame and Indignation.’ 3 

As Aid 6 s and Nemesis thus fade from view', their disappearance draws 
a cry of despair from the weary watcher of the skies. ‘Pain and grief are 
the portion that shall be left for mortal men, and there shall be no 
defence against the evil day.’ 4 Hesiod is harrowed by his illusory con¬ 
viction—which it never occurs to him to doubt—that the withdrawal 
of the glimmering light that has sustained the children of the Dark Age 
through their vigil is a portent of the onset of an unmitigated and per¬ 
petual night; and he has no inkling that, on the contrary, this extinguish¬ 
ing of beacons is a harbinger of the return of day. The truth is that 
Aid 6 s and Nemesis rcascend into Heaven as soon as the imperceptible 
emergence of a nascent new civilization has made their sojourn on Earth 
superfluous by bringing into currency other virtues that are socially 
more constructive though aesthetically they may be less attractive. The 
Iron Age into which Hesiod lamented that he had been born, because 
it was the age that had seen Aidds and Nemesis shake the dust of this 
Earth from off their feet, was in fact the age in which a living Hellenic 
Civilization was arising out of a dead Minoan Civilization’s ruins; and 
the 'Abbasids, who had no use for the Hilm that had been their Umayyad 
predecessors’ arcanum imperii, were the statesmen who set the seal on 
the Umayyads’ tour dc force of profiting by the obliteration of the Syrian 
limes of the Roman Empire through the demonic outbreak of the 
Primitive Muslim Arabs in order to reinauguratc a Syriac universal 
state that had been prematurely overthrown, a thousand years before, 
by Alexander the Great.* 

“With the 'Abbasids, Hilm will lose its value in the sphere of govern¬ 
ment, to become a virtue of private life. After the destruction of the former 


1 Chadwick, &. .VI.: The Heroic Age (Cambridge 1912, University Press), p. 44a. 
i Hesiod: Works and Days, 11 . 197-200. 

♦ Ibid., II. 200-1. 1 See 1 .1. 77. 



58 HEROIC AGES 

Arab supremacy and Arab society ..absolutism, now firmly established 
from one end of the Islamic World to the other, no longer felt the neces¬ 
sity of resorting to Hilm in order to overcome the recalcitrance of a public 
opinion which, thenceforward, was condemned to silence. ... In under¬ 
mining, at its foundations, the organisation of the former Arab Society, 
and in forcing all necks to bow beneath the dead level of despotism, the 
'Abbasid regime was to obtain more decisive results than the lectures 
( mercuriales ) delivered [by Umayyad governors] from the tribunes at 
Kufah and Basrah.’ 1 


It was significant that, in order to ensure the salvaging of the Syriac 
Civilization from the chaos of a post-Hellenic Arab heroic age, there had 
to be a change of political regime, and that the barbaric turbulence of 
the Arab war-bands could be reduced to order only at the price of also 
suppressing their aristocratic freedom; for the Primitive Muslim Arabs 
had been perhaps the most gifted of all barbarian warriors, and the 
Umayyads of all barbarian statesmen, that had so far flitted across the 
stage of History. Umayyad statesmanship had achieved the unparalleled 
feat of transforming an Arab barbarian successor-state of the Roman 
Empire in Syria into an avatar of the universal state that had originally 
been provided for the Syriac Civilization, eleven hundred years before, 
by the Empire of the Achaemenidac. This was an achievement of which 
the Umayyads’ Ghassanid forerunners had never dreamed, and to which 
the Ghassanids’ Palmyrene predecessors had aspired with disastrous 
consequences for themselves. Yet the raw material of Arab barbarism 

E roved so intractable even to the Umayyad genius 2 that an Umayyad 
•avid’s work had to be completed by an 'Abbasid Solomon. The exact¬ 
ing, though misguided, task of evoking, in a nascent Far Eastern and 
noscent Western Christian Society, a ghost of the antecedent civiliza¬ 
tion’s universal state was likewise beyond the interloping barbarians’ 
powers. It is not surprising that, before this task could be taken in hand 

1 Lammens, S.J., Pi re H.: Eludes sur le Rtgne du Calife Omaiyade Mo'data 1 " 
(Pari* 1908, Gcuthner). pp. 106 and 86-87. For the anti-ariatocratic egalitarianism of the 
despotic 'Abbasid r*gime, see the present Study, VI. vii. 149-52. 

1 'Quand on itudie Ics origines ct l'organisation de 1’Empire Arabe, on ne tarde 
pas 4 ddcouvrir l'inconsistance de la base appuyant cette dnormc machine; la contra¬ 
diction perpdtuelle entre la grandeur de l'entreprise et 1'impropridtd des moyens des¬ 
tines 4 la faire aboutir: veritable tare originelle, dont les effets n’ont pas cessd de *e faire 
sentir ... II faut tenir comptc de la matiire ingrate *ur laquellc opdra le grand calife 
[Mu'iwiyah], de la resistance opposde & son action par l’irriductiblc individualisme dea 
Arabes. II parvint non seulement A les discipliner; mais il les transforma en conquerants, 
capablcs dc dominer des pcuples supdrieura 4 eux par l’intelligcncc et par la civilisation. 
.... Pour comprendre 4 quoi aurait abouti entre leurs mains la direction de l'Islun sans 
l’intervention des Omaiyades [the Umayyads], il audit de considdrer la situation de l'lraq 
et des provinces orientale* au moment oti elles echurent cn partage a Mu'Awiyah. Dans 
les mdtropolcs, KOfah et Basrah, le meurtre, le vol et l’incendie ctaient des faits quoti- 
diens. 'Umar et 'Uthman avaient dO rcnoncer 4 y dtablir un semblant d’ordre. La voix 
de ‘Ali n’arriva pas 4 dominer 1 c tumulte. Impuissant 4 sc faire respecter, il dchoua dans 
la tentative d'imposer son prestige de gendre du Prophdtc, son anciennctd dans l’Islam. 
qu’il ne cessait de mettre cn avant; train* 4 la remorque des bandes arabes dont il dtait 
le chef nominal, frdquemmcnt abandonnd, parfois menacd de mort. Sans l'intervention 
des Omaiyades et de leurs dnergiques reprdsentants—les Ziyad, les 'Ubaydallih, les 
Hajjij, Ics Khalid al-Qasri—tout (’Empire Musulman sc fGt transform*, comme l’lraq, 
en un champ-clos oG les Arabes seraient venus vider leurs mesquines qucrclles de tribus 
(Lammens, S.J., Lc Pire H.: Eludes sur le Rignt du Calife Omaiyade Mo'dicia 1 " 
(Paris 1908, Geuthner), pp. 273, 274, and 278). [The transliteration of the Arabic 
pro^er^ names has been brought into line with the usage followed in this Study.— 



THE CATACLYSM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 59 
in Western Christendom, the faineant Merovingian epigoni of Clovis 
had to make way for the Carolingians. It is more remarkable that, in the 
Far East, the epigoni of the Eurasian Nomad barbarian interlopers, who 
had been so receptive in their attitude towards the legacy of the Sinic 
culture,' should have had likewise to make way for the sedentary bar¬ 
barian To Pa, and these still more receptive barbarians, 2 in their turn, 
for successor-states which were harbingers of the imperial Sui and 
T’ang. 


The Outbreak of an Invincible Criminality 

The demon who takes possession of the barbarian's soul as soon as 
the barbarian’s foot has crossed the fallen limes is indeed difficult to exor¬ 
cise, because he contrives to pervert the very virtues with which his 
victim has armed himself in order to keep the demon at bay. 

'Just as the athlete of asceticism strives to outdo himself because he has 
lost the sane measure of social intercourse, so the viking is tempted to 
overshoot his own mark: his honour becomes more exacting and often 
roars like a rapacious beast that never knows when it has had its fill.’* 


When the barbarian’s own peculiar virtue of AidSs thus treacherously 
ministers to the frenzy which it is its mission to curb, the barbarian has 
lost his desperate battle with himself, and his moral discomfiture is 
advertised in an orgy of violence which eventually cures itself by the 
drastic remedy of devouring its authors. 

To employ the terminology of the post-Hellenic Arab heroic age, 
Hilm is worsted—and is bound to be worsted—sooner or later by its anti¬ 
thesis and adversary Jahl. While the literal meaning of this Arabic word 
is ‘ignorance’, it has a connotation of ‘passionateness (emportement), 
violence, and a brutality which, among the Arabs, was sometimes con¬ 
fused with virility’. 4 The nick-name Abu Jahl means, not ‘the ignorant’, 
but ‘the impetuous’ or ‘the emotional ( le passionnd)'} 

‘In its usage as conveying the antithesis of Hilm, Jahl incarnates all the 
faults deriving from rusticity and from lack of savoir-viyre, all the passion¬ 
ateness ( 1 ‘emportement) of youth, all the excesses committed by brute force 
when it escapes from the control of the Reason. The jdhil is the enemy of 
the peace-lovers or peace-makers, 6 he is destitute of the strict idea of jus¬ 
tice, 7 he is the victim of pleasure, and allows himself to be captivated by 
the seductive charms of women. 8 He is also the unrcflective character, 
the impotent sui of the Latins—incapable of mastering the angry passions. 
Jahl is . . . the roughness of the manners of the Desert, the absence of 
restraint in language, an obliviousness of decorum. It is Jahl that betrays 
its addict into violations of the code of honour laid down in the customs 
of the Desert, and into failures to live up to the convenances of social intcr- 


« See Franke, O.: Grsehichte des Chinesitchen Reichts, vol. ii (Berlin and Leipzig 
1036, de Gruytcr), pp. 40-41. . 

i For an example of the Sinophilism of the To Po, see V. v. 477 - 3 . A master y treat¬ 
ment of the subject will be found in Eberhard, W.: Dot Toba-Reich Nord-Chinas 
(Leiden 1049. Brill). ..... . , . . 

> Grfinbcch, V.: The Culture of the Teutons (London 1931, Milford, 3 vol*. in 2), 
vola. ii-iii, p. 305. * Ummena, op. cit., p. 84. 

» Ibid., p. 8 5. 4 xxv. 64. ... 

* Our an. zii. it: 3 


7 Qur'an, xxxiii. 72. 


Qur'an, xu. 33; xxviu. 55. 



60 HEROIC AGES 

course, the laws of hospitality, the duties of friendship, and, in short, "the 
new spirit”, inaugurated by Islam, to which ... the Badu never suc¬ 
ceeded in conforming.' 1 

Indeed, the Badawl frankly looked back to the Jdhiliyah as ‘the good 
old times when people were able to live without constraint, "without 
suspecting the existence of Muhammad” \ 2 In the social and psycho¬ 
logical landscape of the Arab heroic age the jahil and the halim were 
complementary' characterizations which, between them, provided a 
temperamental classification for the whole of Mankind; 3 but the issue 
of the struggle between the two temperaments was a foregone con¬ 
clusion, since the weights in the respective scales were utterly unequal. 
Not only did the juhala outnumber the hulama, and this by an over¬ 
whelming majority; the most deadly weakness of the exponents of Hilm 
was not their numerical inferiority but their lack of genuine belief in, 
and sincere devotion to, their own principle. Hilm, as we have seen, 4 
‘was not so much a virtue as an attitude’. For Mu'awiyah himself, who 
was the halim par excellence, 

'Hilm was something that appealed to the ambition of this man of 
genius, not as an end, but as a means: not so much as a moral quality 
perfecting [the character of] the individual as for its utility as an instru¬ 
ment of government.’ 5 

When the halim himself is jahil at heart, it is evident that an attitude 
thus struck, without conviction, by a sceptically sophisticated minority 
has no prospect of prevailing. 

The works of a Jahl that Hilm has failed to chasten and that Aid 6 s 
and Nemesis have been impotent to abash have left scars which arc the 
barbarian’s authentic marks in the record of history. His characteristic 
brutality declares itself at his first break-through. The classic example 
is the obliteration of urban life in Transoxania and Khur 3 s 3 n by the 
Mongols when they burst out of the heart of the Eurasian Steppe; but 
the same wanton delight in destruction, and the same desperate fear of 
further visitations that a first experience of these horrors has inspired 
in their victims, are attested hardly less emphatically by the archaeo¬ 
logical evidence from the Hellenic World of the third century of the 
Christian Era. In the walls built on the morrow of the disaster round the 
citadel of Ankara, 6 across the agora at Athens and round the cities of 
Gaul, to provide shelter within a shrunken enceinte for a decimated 
population, the stones cry out 7 as they are wrenched from their original 
emplacements—tomb-stone and altar and column-drum—and are piled 
together in an alinement that cuts across the previous lay-out of the city 
as ruthlessly as if the hands that have thrown up these hasty defences 
had been those of the barbarian destroyer himself. 8 Still more shocking 

1 Lammcns, op. cit., pp. 85-86. 

2 Ibid., p. 83, quoting Ahtal, 311. 4. 

J Ibid., p. 82, quoting Al-Mubarrad: Kamil. 425. 9. 

* In the passage quoted, on p. 56, above, from Lammcns, op. cit., p. 87. 

5 Ibid. p. 01. 

6 See V. vi. 206, with n. 4. » Hab. ii. it; Luke xix. 40. 

* A few days before writing these lines in London on the 17th December, >948, the 
writer had revisited the citadel of Ankara and had seen for the first time the so-called 



THE CATACLYSM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 61 
than the tempestuous storming of Dexippus’s Athens by the Goths is 
the deliberate burning of Xerxes’ apadana at Persepolis by the Mace¬ 
donians; for, while it is true that Alexander did not put the inhabitants 
to the sword, but, on the contrary, doled out the largesse which it had 
been customary for an Achaemenian emperor to distribute when he 
visited his dynasty’s homeland, 1 the destruction of a noble work of archi¬ 
tecture is an inexcusable act of vandalism in a barbarian whose con¬ 
version to Hellenism estops, for him, the Gothic plea of invincible 
ignorance. 

Such wholesale atrocities are the overtures to individual crimes of 
violence that arc the outstanding features of the Heroic Age both in 
history and in legend. The demoralized barbarian society in which 
these dark deeds are perpetrated is so familiar with their performance 
and so obtuse to their horror 2 that the bards whose task it is to im¬ 
mortalize the memory of the war-lords do not hesitate to saddle their 
heroes and heroines with sins of which they have been innocent in real 
life, when a blackening of their characters can heighten the artistic 
merit of the story. 3 This readiness to magnify a character’s artistic 
interest at the cost of his moral reputation might incline the latter-day 
critic to discount the evidence of legend unsupported by independent 
historical testimony, were it not that almost every enormity celebrated 
in epic and saga is accredited by historically recorded parallels for which 
the evidence is impeccable. 

For example, the legendary murder of Priam King of Troy by Achilles’ 
son Pyrrhus is accredited by the historical murder of Atahualpa, the last 
Imperial Inca, by his Spanish barbarian conqueror Pizarro, and of 
Husayn, the last emperor of the Safawl House, by his Afghan barbarian 


'Valerian’ city-wall at Athena cutting across an agora that had been excavated, since 
his last visit to Athens in a.d. 1921, by American archaeological enterprise. A striking 
visual impression of the extremeness 01 the disparity in size between the areas enclosed 
within the Valerian Wall and within the antecedent Hudrianic Wall, respectively, is 
given in the map facing p. 276 of E. P. Blegen’s 'News Items from Athens’ in the 
American Journal of Archaeology, vol. I, No. 3, July-September, 1946. 

* See VI. vii. 209. 

2 The extent of the barbarians’ capacity for the moral digestion of their war-lords’ 
crimes can be measured by the length of the rope that was given by the Franks to the 
Merovingians. 

'The arbitrary and even savage assertion of their power... never for generations seems 
to have weakened the hold of the Merovingian nice on the mass of their subjects, 
whether Frank or Roman. The Merovingian family had some secret spell which guarded 
them and gave them a longer permanence than was conceded to other conquering Ger¬ 
man tribes. The Visigoths had the evil custom of murdering their kings. If Frank kings 
were murdered, it was by the will of some rival of their house. The appeal of Guntram, 
in the church at Orleans in a.d. 585, that his house should be guarded from violence and 
extinction, as the sole defenders of the people, was powerful and probably effective. 
It was a startling appeal for loyalty from a family stained with all the crimes of Pelopid 
legend. It seemed like setting wolves to guard the fold. And yet this would not represent 
the facts and sentiment of the time.... The conquests of Childeric and Clovis had made 
a wandering band of warriors masters of Gaul and Western Germany, and abed new 
lustre on the line of Francion and Merovechus. These exploits, chanted round the 
watch-fires, invested the ruling house with an imaginative halo, which is the surest 
power of kingship’ (Dill, S.: Roman Society in Gaul in the Merovingian Age (London 
1926. Macmillan), pp. 121-2). 

J For instances of such uncomplimentary poetic fiction, see Chadwick, H. M.: The 
Heroic Age (Cambridge 1912, University Press), pp. 156-7. For the tendency of 'heroic 
tradition to part company with historical fact in the interests of art for art’s sake, see 
the present Study, V. v. 607-14. 



62 HEROIC AGES 

jailor Ashraf. The criminality of the Afghans during their seven years’ 
occupation of the Safawl imperial capital, Ispahan, was peculiarly cold¬ 
blooded. 1 * When Husayn Shah Safawl was murdered by the barbarians 
in a.d. 1729, he had not only been their captive since his capitulation 
to their first war-lord Mir Mahmud on the 21st October, 1722; he had 
lived to see the previous extermination of his household and his family. 

‘In a.d. 1723 [Mahmud] put to death in cold blood some three hundred 
of the nobles and chief citizens, and followed up this bloody deed with 
the murder of about two hundred children of their families. He also killed 
some three thousand of the deposed Shah’s bodyguard, together with 
many other persons whose sentiments he mistrusted or whose influence 
he feared.’ 1 

On the 7th February', 1725, Mahmud went on to murder all surviving 
members of the imperial family except Husayn himself and two of his 
younger children—a crime which was overtaken by poetic justice when, 
on the 22nd April following, Mahmud in his turn was assassinated by 
his own cousin Ashraf for the prize of an usurped Iranian imperial 
crown. 3 

The murder of a defenceless defeated prince is the highest rung on 
a descending ladder of barbarian criminality. At the next level below 
this in the inferno of the Heroic Age we behold the barbarian war-band 
murdering, not an enemy prince, but their own leader—in violation of 
the personal duty of the retainer to his chief which is the most sacred 
obligation in the barbarian moral code. This offence is so outrageous in 
the eyes even of a barbarian bard and his audience that it might be 
difficult to find a legendary counterpart of the historic murder of the 
Caliph 'Uthman by a soldiery who had been thrown off their balance by 
the intoxication of victory. 4 * At the next level below this we see a drunken 
Alexander murdering a drunken Cleitus who can boast of having saved 
his slayer-leader’s life at the battle of the Granicus—and this in the 
presence of Hellenes whose already decadent civilization still shines so 
bright by contrast with a Macedonian barbarism that it makes these 
horrified witnesses look like dcmi-gods. s From the murder of a foster¬ 
kinsman 6 comrade-in-arms it is a short step downwards in the pro¬ 
gressive demoralization of the Heroic Age to the murder of a kinsman 
by blood. 

‘Instances of the slaying of kinsmen seem to have been by no means 
uncommon in the Heroic Age. In Beowulf the spokesman of the Danish 
kings, Unferth, is said to have killed his brothers, and, though the fact 

1 See Browne, E.G.: A Literary History of Persia, vol. iv (Cambridge 1928, Univer¬ 

sity Press), pp. 130-3. 

* Ibid., p. 130. _ 1 See ibid., p. 131. 

4 . The closest parallel is perhaps to be found in the mutiny of an Indian Sepoy Army 
against the British employers under whose military leadership they had achieved the 
conquest of a sub-continent within the Time-span of half a century. 

1 During the first phase of the drunken altercation between Alexander and Cleitus 
that was to have this dreadful denouement, Alexander himself turned to two non- 
Macedonian Greek guests of his and asked them: ‘How do Hellenes in Macedonian 
company look to you? Don’t you feel like demigods among beasts?’ (Plutarch’s Life of 
Alexander, chap. 51). 

6 Cleitus was the brother of Alexander’s foster-mother LSnicd. 



THE CATACLYSM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 63 

was a reproach to him, it apparently did not prevent him from holding 
an important office at court. In the same poem we hear of dissensions 
within the Swedish royal family, which ended in death for both Onela 
and Eanmund. According to the legends preserved in Ynglingatal, this 
family had had a very bad record for such quarrels in the past. Among the 
Goths we have the case of Eormenric [Hermanaric], who put his nephews 
Embrica and Fritla to death. And it is by no means only in poetry or 
tradition that we meet with such cases; historians also furnish numerous 
examples. Thus, according to Gregory of Tours, 1 the Burgundian King 
Hilperic was killed by his brother Gundobad, while Sigismund, son of 
the latter, had his own son, Sigiric, put to death.* The Thuringian King 
Irminfrith slew his brother Bcrhthari; 5 the Frankish King Sigiberht was 
murdered by the orders of his son Hlothric. 4 Clovis is said to have put to 
death a number of his relatives, while his sons and grandsons were 
repeatedly involved in deadly strife. 5 In view of such evidence wc must 
conclude that the primitive sanctity of the family was giving way in the 
Heroic Age. 6 

The Merovingian evidence is, indeed, lavish. 

‘The faithlessness attributed to the Franks in ancient writers reached 
its height in the relations of the Frank kings even with their nearest kin. 
Clovis by treachery and ruthlessness had swept from his path rivals pro¬ 
bably equally treacherous at Cologne and Cambrai. His sons and grand¬ 
sons, in insidious attacks on one another and shameless perfidy, almost 
improved on his example. ... To this strange race, crime and perfidy 
were the most natural things in the world, and their mean avidity seems 
to have been equal to their treachery. Brothers as they were, proud of 
their blood and race, they appear to have regarded sworn alliances as only 
made for convenience and to be broken at pleasure. They were like wild 
animals, watching one another in mutual fear, and always ready to spring. 
Among a race so faithless, perfidy was often the only means of safety. 
The crimes of the second generation make perhaps even a darker tale 
than those of the first.’ 7 


In the sinister light of Teutonic barbarian legend and history, the 
Achaean barbarian tale of the curse on the House of Atrcus falls into 
social and psychological perspective. Both its agonizing crescendo move¬ 
ment and its merciful finale become comprehensible. The progressive 
heightening of the horror, from the ghastly banquet of Thyestes, 
through the murder of a husband by his unfaithful wife, to the slaying 
of a mother by her distracted son, follows the rhythm of the Heroic Age 
as the iniquity of the fathers is visited upon the children unto the third 
and fourth generation 8 —not because they have been condemned to 
suffer by the fiat of a god whose wrath they have provoked by hating 
him, but because they have been robbed of the moral raiment of primitive 
custom by the radiation of a decadent civilization and then have run 


G 

Sec 


regorius Turonensi* 


Historia Franiorum, Book II, chap. 2S 
id., Book III, chap. 5. 


» See ibid., Book III, chap. 4. 


See ibid., Book II, chap. 40. 


» 'In some cases the deed^was certainly done by the relative’s own hand. Such wag 


the case with Lothair and the song of Chlodomer (Gregory of Tourt, op. cic.. Book III, 
chap. 18).’ 

6 Chadwick, H. M.: The Heroic Age (Cambridge 1912, University Press), pp. 3 . 4 ?“ 7 * 

7 Dili, S.: Roman 

pp. 281-3. 


1 : The Heroic Are (Cambridge 1912, University Press), pp. 346-7. 
1 Society in Caul 1 n (he Merovingian Age (London 1926, Macmillan), 

* Exod. xx. 5. 


64 HEROIC AGES 

wild to wander naked in the moral wilderness left by this neighbour 
society’s collapse. The lifting of the curse after its operation has come 
to an intolerable climax is one of the first-fruits of the banning of the 
post-Minoan Heroic Age by the beneficent Attic genius of a nascent 
Hellenic Civilization 1 at the dawn following a darkness which an epi- 
methean Hesiod had mistaken for eternal night. 2 

When the members of a barbarian war-lord’s kin-group turn their 
murderous hands against one another, it is not surprising to sec a dead 
leader’s royal brood exterminated by the hands of impious alien usurpers 
in the next chapter of the story—as the family of Alexander was liqui¬ 
dated by Cassander, and the grandson of Muhammad by the Umayyads. 1 
A slaughtered Husayn received the posthumous recompense of being 
idealized as a martyr whose etherialized blood mingled with his father’s 4 
to become the seed of a Shi'I Church; but Olympias, Roxana, and the 
child Alexander IV did not even find a pagan bard to make poetry of 
their painful deaths. 

Such mass-murders are mere incidents in civil strife within the bosom 
of barbarian communities that arc highly enough organized to be 
capable of it. Long and deadly civil wars were the immediate sequel to 
swift and facile conquests of derelict worlds in the heroic ages of the 
Western Christian Spanish conquerors of the Aztecs and the Incas, the 
Hellenized Macedonian conquerors of the Achaemenidae, the sub¬ 
sequent Hellenic conquerors of the Mauryan Empire in India, 5 and the 
Primitive Muslim Arab conquerors of the Romans and the Sasanidae— 
Arabs who, to damn them with faint praise, had been perhaps the least 
barbarous of all barbarians up to date. These episodes need not be re¬ 
capitulated here, since they have been surveyed already, in a different 
context, 6 as examples of the militarist's ‘burden of Nineveh’. In this 
place we need only point to the manifest conclusion that 'every kingdom 
divided against itself is brought to desolation, and every city or house 
divided against itself shall not stand’. 7 

The Dtbdclc of an Ephemeral Barbarian Ascendancy 

A sensationally sudden fall from an apparent omnipotence to an un¬ 
mistakable impotence is, indeed, the characteristic fate of an Heroic-Age 

* The sovereign virtue of Hellenism was the moderation that is exemplified in the 

judgement given by the Athenian jurors and their presiding Goddess Athena at the 
denouement of Aeschylus's Atreidan trilogy; and it is significant that the psychological 
talisman through which Hellenism succeeded in overcoming the demonic spirit of a 
post-Minoan heroic age was likewise the key to the exorcism of a post-Hellenic heroic 
age by the nascent civilization of a Western Christendom. In this chapter of history, 
‘moderation ... is the outstanding virtue of the chivalrous type that succeeded the heroic 
type of the earlier ages’ (Menendcz Pidal, Ramdn: The Cid and his Spain, English 
translation (London 1054. John Murray), p. 421). ' See p. 57, above. 

* In justice to the Umayyads it should not be foigotten that Husayn brought his 
death upon himself by his own folly. The Umayyad Government would have given a 
fortune to see him die in his bed as their pensioner, like his elder brother Hasan after 
his abdication from the succession to their father ’Ali (the allegation that Hasan met 
his death, not by disease, but by poison, has been dismissed as non-proven by Lammcns, 
S.J., Le Pire H.: Eludes sur le Rtgne du Calife Omaiyade Mo'dvAa l" (Paris, 1908, 
Geuthncr), pp. I 49 - 53 )- 

* All’s assassin was a fellow Arab, but, so far from being an agent of Mu’awiyah’s, 

he was a Kharijite. s See I. i. 86. 

6 In IV. iv. 484-6. i Matt. xii. 25. Cp. Mark iii. 24-25; Luke xi. 17. 



THE CATACLYSM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 65 
barbarian Power. Striking historical examples of this play of the ironic 
law of Trepirrereia are the eclipse of the Western Huns after the death 
of Attila, the eclipse of the Vandals after the death of Genscric, the 
eclipse of the Ostrogoths after the death of Theodoric, and the eclipse 
of the Serbs after the death of Stephen Dushan. These well-attested 
instances lend credibility to the tradition that the wave of Achaean con¬ 
quest likewise broke and collapsed immediately after engulfing Troy, and 
that a murdered Agamemnon was the last Pan-Achaean war-lord* The 
same fate sometimes overtakes the legacies even of those more construc¬ 
tive empire-builders who sweep away decadent barbarian principalities 
in order to clear the ground for the appearance of the first green shoots 
of a new civilization. The eclipse of the Timurids after the death of Timur 
Lenk and the eclipse of the Carolingians after the death of Charlemagne 
were as abrupt and complete as those of any sheerly barbarian Power. 

The Huns under Attila had terrorized Europe from its Baltic to its 
Mediterranean coast; the Vandals under Genseric had similarly terror¬ 
ized the Mediterranean from its African to its European shores; the 
Ostrogoths under Theodoric had been masters of Italy; the Serbs under 
Stephen Dushan had dominated the Balkan Peninsula; the Achaeans 
under Agamemnon are reputed to have held a ‘thalassocracy’ in the 
Aegean which they had wrested from the Minoans or from the Minoan 
World’s Mycenaean marchmcn. The sudden paralysis of the energies 
that had been manifesting themselves in these exhibitions of power is 
to be explained by the utter incapacity of the barbarians for creating 
stable and enduring political institutions. Their political potency hangs 
on the thread of the single life of some war-lord of genius; and, as soon 
as this thread snaps, they relapse into anarchy. Sometimes the war-lord 
himself reveals the limitations of his own political sense by ineptly pro¬ 
viding in his testament for the partition of his dominions among his 
heirs, and it was this that was the bane of the Merovingians and the 
Carolingians in succession. The testator’s apologia would be that, if he 
did not make provision for an orderly division in his will, his kindred 
would assuredly take the law into their own violent hands by fighting 
one another for the prize of his inheritance; and such forebodings are 
borne out by a host of historical instances. Sometimes, again, a bar¬ 
barian principality may fall to pieces owing to the death or unduly pro¬ 
longed absence of the war-lord on some too ambitiously distant or 
difficult military adventure. This is the situation depicted in the opening 
books of the Odyssey. In the twentieth year of the interregnum arising 
from the absence of Odysseus, every budding squire in the realm is 
already playing the king;' and the comparable break-up of the Scandi¬ 
navian barbarian principality of Kiev in the twelfth century of the 
Christian Era 2 authenticates the verisimilitude of the Homeric picture 
presented in the Telemacheia without encouraging us to believe in the 
happy ending which the poet’s plot requires him to give to his story. 


< A catalogue of 10S suitors for the hand of Penelope from the several isles of Odys¬ 
seus’ kingdom is given by Telemachus in Odyssey . Book XVI, 11 . 245- SS- 

* See Kliutschewskij, W. [Kluchevski, V.]: Geschichte Rutslands, vol. a (Berlin I 92 S> 
Obelisk-Verlag), pp. 191-2. 





66 HEROIC AGES 

In real life the divided house docs fall; and an identical denouement 
is produced by three variations on one theme. The barbarian successor- 
state of a moribund universal state may be laid low by a counter-blow 
from its expiring victim; or it may meet the same violent death at the 
hands of fellow barbarians; or it may languish in impotence, after com¬ 
ing to the end of its prodigal feast on carrion flesh, till it is swept off the 
stage of History to make way either for the re-entry of an old civilization 
or for the entry of a new' one. A scrutiny of our table of barbarian war- 
bands 1 yields the following catalogue of instances of these alternative 
evil ends. 

A revanche on the part of a civilization so far gone in the downward 
course of its decline as to have been unable to prevent the barbarians 
from breaking in, yet not so far gone as to be incapable of hitting back, 
is rare at the final relapse, when a universal state is breaking up, but less 
uncommon in the earlier chapter of the story in which the establishment 
of a universal state is evoked by a Time of Troubles rising to its climax. 

The most signal examples of the crushing of a barbarian invader by 
a moribund civilization are to be found in Egyptiac history. The Egyptiac 
Society actually rose, like Osiris, from the dead, to confound the ap¬ 
parently triumphant barbarian successors of ‘the Middle Empire’, when 
the Hyksos were expelled from the Delta, and their survivors were pur¬ 
sued and subjugated, in their Syrian asylum, by a fresh breed of Theban 
empire-builders who brought the Egyptiac universal state to life again 
in the form of ‘the New Empire ’. 1 Moreover, this revanche upon the 
Hyksos, in which ‘the New Empire’ came to birth, is matched by the 
feat on which, some four hundred years later, this resuscitated Egyptiac 
universal state expended its last expiring energies. The decisive victory 
of ‘the New Empire’ of Egypt over the Achacans and the other ‘peoples 
of the sea’ in the first decade of the twelfth century B.c. brought the 
barbarians to a dead halt at the threshold of the invaded Egyptiac 
World’s heartland in the Lower Nile Valley; and the lesson was so severe 
that, though the survivors of the foiled barbarian war-bands were able 
to encamp on ‘the New Empire’s’ South Syrian glacis, we have no 
evidence of their ever having ventured to attack the Delta again. 

Ramses Ill’s triumph over ‘the peoples of the sea’ has a counterpart 
in Hellenic history in Justinian’s successive triumphs over the Vandals 
and the Ostrogoths; and in this case the audacious barbarian invaders 
paid the price of annihilation for a sensational temporary success. The 
Roman Imperial Government in the West had failed to prevent the 
Vandals from crossing the Straits of Gibraltar and seizing transmarine 

1 Reproduced in the present volume, on pp. 734-5, from vol. vi, pp. 330-1, above. 

1 The expulsion of the Hyksos from the Delta in the sixteenth century b.c. had a 
second-century echo in the reaction at that date against the Ptolemaic Macedonian 
domination. These two Egyptiac revolts against barbarian rule were animated by an 
identical spirit of ‘Zealotism’, though their fortunes differed in the respective degrees of 
their outward success. On the later occasion the Egyptiac ‘Zealots’ had to acquiesce in 
leaving the Ptolemies on their shaken throne and to content themselves with extorting 
from them far-reaching concessions to Egyptiac sentiment. If, in the next chapter of 
the story, the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt had not been incorporated into an Hellenic 
universal state in the shape of the Roman Empire, the Coptic triumph over Hellenism 
in the Kulturkampf of the fifth and sixth centuries of the Christian Era might have come 
five or six hundred years sooner than it did. 



THE CATACLYSM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 67 

Roman dominions in North-West Africa which ought to have been the 
Empire’s impregnable citadel against barbarian invaders from the north 
of Continental Europe; 1 and subsequently the Imperial Government at 
Constantinople had been constrained to divert the Ostrogoths from 
harrying the European suburbs of the new imperial capital by actually 
inviting them to invade Italy and occupy Rome. In the blood feud 
between the Romans and these two Teutonic barbarian war-bands the 
vindictiveness of the injured empire’s eventual counter-blow was pro¬ 
portionate to the painfulness of its previous humiliations. This chastise¬ 
ment of the Vandals and the Ostrogoths by Justinian has Ottoman 
parallels in Mchmed 'All Pasha’s chastisement of the Wahhabis and 
Sultan Mahmud II’s chastisement of the Kurds—with the difference 
that these Ottoman ‘Hcrodians’ 2 overthrew their barbarian adversaries 
with the aid of a Western military’ technique imparted by French and 
Prussian instructors, whereas Justinian mobilized the martial virtue of 
his home-grown Isaurian barbarians and the military- equipment of the 
Sarmatian Nomads 1 for his victorious counter-offensive against the cpi- 
goni of Genseric and Theodoric. 

There is a longer list of barbarian invaders of a civilization in its Time 
of Troubles who have been evicted or annihilated by the founders of the 
affiliated civilization’s universal state, or by those founders’ fore¬ 
runners. This retribution was exacted from the Gutaean invaders of 
Sumer and Akkad by Utu-khegal of Erech, the forerunner of Ur- 
Engur’s {alias Ur-Nammu’s) Sumeric ‘Empire of the Four Quarters’, 
and from the Scythian invaders of South-Western Asia by the Median 
forerunners of the Achaemenian Empire. We may place in the same 
general category the eviction of the Afghan invaders of Iran by Nadir 
Shah, and the eviction of the Mongol invaders of China by the Ming 
in revenge for the intolerable service which these Eurasian Nomad bar¬ 
barians had performed for the main body of the Far Eastern Civilization 
in imposing on it a universal state which it had failed to provide for 
itself. The Serb barbarians who aspired to perform the same sen-ice 
for the main body of Orthodox Christendom were overthrown, without 
ever having set foot within the imperial city of Constantinople, by 
'Osmanli competitors whose Spartan discipline assured their victory 
over the unruly cpigoni of Stephen Dushan. 

The premature timing of an offensive, which was the undoing of the 
Serbs, the Scyths, and the Gutaeans, had twice been similarly fatal to 
Celtic barbarian trespassers. The Continental Celts who, on the morrow 
of the breakdown of the Hellenic Civilization, overwhelmed the peril¬ 
ously exposed Etruscan advance-guard of Hellenism in the Po Basin, 
and who subsequently thrust their way across Gaul into the Iberian 
Peninsula and across the Balkan Peninsula into the heart of Anatolia, 
were successively brought to book by the Roman builders of an Hellenic 
universal state. 4 The Insular Celts who attempted to create a Far 

1 Sec X. ix. 658, n. 3, and 659-62. 

1 For the use of this term in this study, see pp. 580-623, below. 

J See the passage quoted from Procopius in III. iii. 163. 

♦ See II. ii. 279-82. 



68 HEROIC AGES 

Western Christian alternative to a nascent Romanesque Western Chris¬ 
tian Civilization found themselves constrained, like their Scandinavian 
counterparts, to acquiesce in being assimilated to the more puissant 
rival culture . 1 The grimmer fate that might have been theirs if they had 
shown themselves recalcitrant is indicated by the chastisement that the 
unconscionable Continental Saxon barbarians did incur at the hands of 
a Carolingian Power which had not brushed aside the effete barbarism 
of its Merovingian predecessors in order to open the way for an un¬ 
seasonable Saxon repetition of the Teutonic Volkerwandcrung that had 
weltered, four hundred years earlier, over the western provinces of the 
Roman Empire. 

The fratricidal warfare, through which the barbarians save Civilization 
the trouble of having to put them down by ridding the World of one 
another, is perhaps the only beneficent form of ‘genocide ’. 1 By this 
salutary method of progressive elimination the number of the competing 
Macedonian barbarian successor-states of the Achaemenian Empire was 
eventually reduced to three through the overthrow of Antigonus at 
Ipsus J and of Lysimachus at Corupedium; and, by the same process, 
the trio of Turkish and Tungus barbarian successor-states of the Sinic 
universal state was reduced to unity within 120 years of the fall of the 
regime of the United Tsin , 4 and the ‘heptarchy’ of English barbarian 
successor-states of the Roman Empire in Britain was eventually con¬ 
verted into a ‘dyarchy’ in which the whole island, except for Wales, was 
partitioned between a Wessex that had entered into the heritage of 
Mercia and a Lothian that had taken its Scottish conquerors captive . 5 
In the Continental European arena of a post-Hellenic barbarian Volker- 
wanderung the Burgundian squatters on the left bank of the Rhine 
were almost exterminated by the Western Huns—before the Hun 
Power, in its turn, was broken by a revolt of its satellite Teuton war- 
bands after Attila’s death—and a Burgundian remnant which had found 
asylum in Savoy was subsequently subjugated there by the Merovingian 
Franks . 6 The Visigoths evicted the Vandals and Alans from the Iberian 

' The histories of the abortive Far Western Christian and abortive Scandinavian 
civilizations have been sketched in II. ii. 322-60. 

J Instances have been cited, by anticipation, in I. i. 38 and in IV. iv. 

J In spite of this disaster, in which the first Antigonus met his death, his grandson 
and namesake did, of course, succeed in securing for his house the throne of one of the 
three surviving Macedonian polities; but the Macedonian homeland, which thus 
became Antigonus Gonatas’ domain, was a modc8t prize compared with Antigonus 
Monophthalmus's abortive Asiatic empire. 

* Upon the collapse, at the turn of the third and fourth centuries of the Christian 
Era. of the Sinic imperial regime of 'the United Tsin’, which had momentarily re¬ 
established the Sinic universal state in a.d. 280, after a century of disunion, three bar¬ 
barian wnr-bnnds carved successor-states out of the northern fringes of the former 
imperial dominions: the Southern Hiongnu and the To Pa in Shansi, and the Sienpi 
in Liaotung. The Hiongnu principality of 'Pei Han’ came into collision with the To Pa 
in a.d. 312 (within a year of the sack of the eastern imperial capital, Loyang, by these 
Hiongnu in A.D. 311). In A.D. 318 ‘Pei Han' broke up (two years after the sack of the 
western imperial capital, Ch’ang-Ngan, by these Hiongnu in A.D. 316). In A.D. 338 the 
Hiongnu principality was reconstituted, under the name of ‘Chao’, only to be con¬ 
quered in a.d. 352 by ‘Yen', the Sienpi principality in Liaotung. 'Yen’, in its turn, was • 
conquered in a.d. 436 by 'Wei*—the classical name that had been assumed by the vic¬ 
torious principality of the Tungus To Pa (see Cordier, H.: Hutoire Gtnirale de la Chine 
(Paris 1920-1. Gcuihncr. 4 vols.), vol. i. pp. 306-23). s See II. ii. 190-3. 

6 In a.d. 413 the main body of the Burgundians had settled, by agreement with the 



THE CATACLYSM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 69 
Peninsula before they were themselves evicted by the Franks from Gaul, 
and they subsequently subjugated the Sueves in Galicia before being 
driven, by their own Arab conquerors, into the adjoining mountain fast¬ 
ness of Asturias. The Arabs, on their way to conquering all but a frag¬ 
ment of the Iberian Peninsula from their Visigothic fellow barbarians, 
subjugated in North-West Africa the Berber barbarians who had plagued 
both the Romans and the Vandals with impunity. 

The ‘face’ which the Roman Empire had lost when Odovacer broke 
the rules of the political game in a disintegrating universal state 1 by 
deposing Romulus Augustulus, the puppet emperor in the West, and 
undisguisedly taking the reins of government into his own hands, was 
recovered, without any military exertion on the Constantinopolitan 
Imperial Government’s part, when the tactless Scirian barbarian war¬ 
lord Odovacer was treacherously murdered by the faithless Ostrogothic 
barbarian war-lord Thcodoric. Odovacer had opened the gates of an 
impregnable Ravenna to his hereditary enemy in consideration of a 
solemn undertaking, on Theodoric’s part, to share the possession of 
Italy with Odovacer on equal terms. Thcodoric’s murderous breach of 
faith is characteristic of the methods by which the barbarian ‘heroes’ 
snatch an ephemeral dominion from one another; and retribution over¬ 
took this crime when Theodoric’s ill-gotten dominion over Italy was 
wrested from his cpigoni by the Constantinopolitan Imperial Govern¬ 
ment that had instigated Thcodoric himself to move on to Italy from 
Illyricum. In reconquering Italy from the Ostrogoths at the cost of 
disastrously depleting the man-power of Illyricum and the wealth of the 
Oriental provinces of the Empire, Justinian was unwittingly working, 
not for himself nor for his heirs, but for the Lombard war-lord Alboin, 
who was the ultimate beneficiary of the Great Romano-Gothic War of 
a.d. 537-53. Before posthumously avenging the extermination of the 
Ostrogoths by making an easy entry into a devastated Italy, Alboin, in 
concert with the Avars, had exterminated the Ostrogoths’ kinsmen the 
Gepidac, who had been the principal beneficiaries of the previous 
extermination of the Avars’ fellow Nomads the Western Huns. 

This auspicious proclivity of the barbarians for liquidating one 
another is likewise illustrated in the histories of the break-up of the 
Arab Caliphate and the break-up of the Khazar Empire in the Great 
Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe. When the collapse of the Far 
Western Umayyad Caliphate created a political vacuum in Andalusia 
which sucked in Berber Muslim barbarians from Africa and Frankish 
Christian barbarians from Europe, the Murabit Lamtuna Berber inter- 

Roman authorities, on the left bank of the middle Rhine, round Worms. In a.d. 437 
these Burgundians were attacked and crushed by the Huns at the instigation of the 
Roman war-lord AJtius. In thus serving as the Romans’ executioners the Huns were 
taking a vicarious revenge for a severe reverse that they had suffered in A.D. 430 at the 
hands of a trans-Rhenane rearguard of the Burgundians in the mountainous country 
between Rhine, Main, and Neckar. This obscure concatenation of inter-barbarun con¬ 
flicts is elucidated by E. A. Thompson: A History of Attila and the Hunt (Oxford 1948. 
Clarendon Press), pp. 65-67. The Burgundians who settled in Savoy in a.d. 443 were 
survivors of the disaster of A.D. 437. This Burgundy on the Rh6ne was conquered by 
the Merovingians in a.d. 532. 

t The role of a universal state, in the last chapter of its history, as a source of legiti¬ 
mization for its de facto successors has been examined in VI. vii. 12-16. 



7 o HEROIC AGES 

lopcrs were overthrown, as we have seen, 1 by the Muwahhid Masmuda, 
and the Masmuda by the Marinid Zanata. On the frontier of a dis¬ 
integrating 'Abbasid Caliphate over against the Eurasian Steppe, a 
Turkish wave of Nomad barbarian invaders was similarly pursued and 
submerged by a following Mongol wave, while the survivors of a foun¬ 
dered Khazar Empire lived to witness, from their asylum in the moun¬ 
tain fastnesses of the Crimea, the transformation of the Khazars’ own 
former imperial domain in the Eurasian Steppe’s Great Western Bay 
into a maelstrom where successive waves of Magyar, Pcchcncg, Ghuzz, 
Cuman, and Mongol Nomad barbarian invaders, breaking westward out 
of the depths of die vast steppe-ocean, were shattered by their impact 
on one another. At the Far Eastern extremity of the Old World the 
Khitan Nomad invaders of a disintegrating China were evicted by the 
Kin highlanders from Manchuria, as the Lamtuna Nomads were 
supplanted in the Maghrib and Andalusia by the Masmuda highlanders 
from the Atlas; and the Kin, in their turn, suffered at the Mongols’ 
hands the retribution that was meted out to the Masmuda by the 
Zanata. 

The ignominious fate of lingering on to be snuffed out eventually, 
unregretted, by scavenger-harbingers of a resurgent civilization was re¬ 
served for the Kassite squatters in Babylonia; the Merovingian and 
Lombard interlopers in Roman Gaul and Italy; the Umayyad successors 
of the Romans tram Taurum and of the Sasanidae; the Libyan squatters 
in the homeland of ‘the New Empire’ of Egypt; the Chaghatiy Mongol 
Eurasian Nomad overlords of Transoxania; the Mongol U-Khans of 
HOlagu’s line who had liquidated the Turkish successor-states of the 
'Abbasid Caliphate, and the remnant of the 'Abbasid Power itself, in 
Iran and 'Iraq; and the ‘Parthian’ Eurasian Nomad Parni who, in their 
day, had wrested the same territories from the weakening grasp of the 
epigoni of Seleucus Nicator. The Kassites were cleared away by native 
representatives of a nascent Babylonic Civilization, the Merovingians 
and the Lombard successors of Alboin by the Carolingians, the Umay- 
yads by the 'Abbasids, the Libyans by the Deltaic Egyptian Pharaohs 
of the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty with the aid of Carian and Ionian ‘brazen 
men from the sea’; the Chaghatay Mongols by Timur Lenk, the II- 
Khans by a litter of ephemeral successor-states, the ‘Parthian’ Arsacidac 
by the Sasanidae from Fars. The Arsacids, Umayyads, Lombards, and 
Chaghatay Mongols partially retrieved the humiliation of their exit by 
fighting a losing battle against their suppressors; and the survivors of 
the 'Abbasids’ Umayyad victims who succeeded in re-establishing an 
Umayyad Caliphate in miniature in Andalusia, beyond their KhurasanI 
adversaries’ reach, were emulating the spirit of that uncharacteristically 
stiff-necked minority among the descendants of the Libyan squatters in 
Egypt who preferred to trek up the Nile into the Sudanese Gazfrah 
rather than submit to the rule of the apostles of an archaising Egyptiac 
reaction. 2 A majority of the Libyan trespassers in Egypt preferred, like 
the Kassites and the Merovingians, to die ‘the cow’s death’ that, in the 

1 On p. 49, above. 

1 This incident has been touched upon in VI. vii. 1x8-19. 



THE CATACLYSM AND ITS CONSEQUENCES 71 
barbarian’s own eyes, is the worst disgrace that he can bring upon 
himself. 

The only barbarians who had escaped all these alternative evil ends 
were those whose incursion into the domain of a disintegrating civiliza¬ 
tion beyond a fallen limes had been accompanied by their conversion to 
some still vigorous civilization in their rear. The Macedonians, for 
example, were Greek-speaking barbarians' who had been exposed to 
the radiation of the Hellenic Civilization, created by the Greek city- 
states round the shores of the Aegean, for many generations before the 
date of Alexander’s crossing of the Hellespont. The deliberate Helleniza- 
tion of Macedonia by Alexander’s father Philip was the prelude to the 
Macedonians’ conquest of the Achaemcnian Empire as apostles of 
Hellenism; and, though, as we have seen, the Achaemenian Empire’s 
Macedonian successor-states all, in different ways, displayed the 
political instability that is characteristic of principalities set up by 
barbarian war-bands, these peritura regna did, nevertheless, succeed in 
performing one piece of creative work in sowing seeds of Hellenism on 
Oriental ground that were subsequently harvested by the Roman 
Empire. This Macedonian story had been repeated in the cultural his¬ 
tory of the Asturian and Pyrenaean barbarians who had emulated the 
Macedonians’ feat of overrunning the domains of several disintegrating 
civilizations. 2 The Visigoth refugees in Asturias and their Basque neigh¬ 
bours in the Western Pyrenees started life imbued with a tincture of a 
then already nascent Western Christian Civilization; and this tincture 
was successively reinforced in the ninth century of the Christian Era, 
when the southern foothills of the Central and Eastern Pyrenees were 
conquered from the Umayyads by the Carolingians, and in the eleventh 
century, when Lconesc and Castilian war-bands began to encroach in 
earnest on the indigenous successor-states of an Andalusian Umayyad 
Caliphate. 

‘When in a.d. 1002 Northern Spain eventually emancipated herself 
from Islam, she applied herself to the task of restoring her weakened links 
with the rest of Europe. The liturgy, clergy, monasteries, handwriting- 
all her institutions and customs—were reformed in the time of the Cid 
and brought into line with the standards prevailing in Western Europe. 
This great change was helped forward by the influx of knights, clerics, 
burghers and settlers from beyond the Pyrenees, who filled the places of 
those inhabitants of Castile and Leon who had moved southwards.’ 3 

In a similar way the Scandinavian barbarian intruders on the forest 
fringes of the Khazar Empire in the Dnicpr Basin were salvaged by their 
conversion to Eastern Orthodox Christianity; the Cossack barbarians 
who followed the Russian rivers out of the Forest into the Steppe and 
ventured to beard the epigoni of the Golden Horde on the Eurasian 


* See III. iii. 477-89. . . 

i The Macedonians overran the domains of the Hittite, Syriac, Egypnac, Babylonic, 
and Indie civilizations; the Spaniards overran the domains of the Syriac Civilization in 
the Iberian Peninsula and of the Central American and Andean civilizations in the 
New World. . . 

> Menendez Pidal, Ramdn: The Cid and His Spain, English translation (London 1934, 
Murray), p. 452. See also the present Study, V. v. 242, n. 4. 



72 HEROIC AGES 

Nomads’ own element were incorporated into the universal state which 
was provided for the Russian offshoot of Orthodox Christendom by 
Muscovy; and the Serb and the Rumeliot and Maniot Greek barbarian 
carvers of successor-states out of the carcass of the Ottoman Empire 
were converted in the act, more Macedonico, to the secular civilization 
of a Modem Western World. 1 

These instances of salvation through conversion, rare though they 
arc, show that even the barbarian interloper on the domain of a mori¬ 
bund civilization is not inexorably doomed. 

1 See II. ii. 181-6. 



E. DICHTUNG UND WAHRHEIT 


(I) A PHANTASY OF HEROISM 


J F there is truth in the picture presented in the preceding chapter, the 
verdict on the Heroic Age can only be a severe one. The mildest 
judgement will convict it of having been a futile escapade, while sterner 
judges will denounce it as a criminal outrage. 

The verdict of futility was once pronounced, in tragic circumstances, 
by a conquered barbarian war-lord whose previous station and sub¬ 
sequent personal experiences entitled him to speak on this point with 
unchallengeable authority. In a . d . 534 Gelimir, the ex-king of an 
ephemeral Vandal barbarian successor-state of the Roman Empire in 
North-West Africa, could not forget, while he was dragging his feet 
through the streets of Constantinople in a Roman triumphal procession 
to celebrate his own overthrow, that he was the fifth successor of a 
Genscric who had conquered Carthage less than a hundred years back 1 
and had sacked Rome herself in a . d . 455. 


'The prisoners led in triumph were Gelimir himself, with a purple 
robe of some sort draped round his shoulders, and the whole of his family, 
together with the very tallest and physically handsomest of the Vandal 
rank-and-file. When Gelimir had arrived at the Hippodrome and beheld 
the Emperor enthroned on a lofty tribune, with the people standing on 
either side of him, and when, as he took in the scene, he realised the ex¬ 
tremity of his own plight, he did not relieve his feelings by weeping or 
groaning aloud, but repeated over and over again a phrase from the 
Hebrew scriptures: “Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.” 1 When he reached 
the Emperor’s tribune they stripped him of his purple and forced him 
to fall on his face and grovel in adoration of Justinian’s imperial majesty 
(TTpoOKWtiv ‘Iovonvtavov fiaatAea ).' 3 

If the unhappy Gelimir had been further humiliated on that day by 
being made to carry a placard epitomizing his experience, the Roman 
official epigrammatist commissioned to compose the headline could not 
have done better than to anticipate three lines written by a latter-day 
Western poet: 

Sown in the Moon shall with the Moon decay, 

Loved in the Moon shall die at touch of day; 

And spring be cold, and roses ashen grey.* 

And the same stark verdict of futility likewise makes itself heard 
through the mellow poetry of a Victorian man of letters who had lived 
on to feel the frost of a neo-barbarian age. 

Follow the path of those fair warriors, the tall Goths 
from the day when they led their blue-eyed families 


« The Vandals had conquered Carthage in A.D. 439 . only ten years after their passage, 
in A.D. 429, from Spain to Africa. 1 Ecd. i. 2. . 

> Procopius: A History of the Wars of Justinian, Book IV, chap. 0, cited in IV. iv. 389. 
* Gilbert Murray, on the title-page of Moonseed, by Rosalind Murray (London 19x1, 
Sidgwick and Jackson). 



74 


HEROIC AGES 

off Vistula’s cold pasture-lands, their murky home 
by the amber-strewen foreshore of the Baltic sea, 
and, in the incontaminat vigor of manliness 
feeling their rumour’d way to an unknown promised land, 
tore at the ravel’d fringes of the purple power, 
and trampling its wide skirts, defeating its armies, 
slaying its Emperor, and burning his cities, 
sack’d Athens and Rome; untill supplanting Caesar 
they ruled the world where Romans reigned before:— 

Yet from those three long centuries of rapin and blood, 
inhumanity of heart and wanton cruelty of hand, 
ther is little left. . . . Those Goths wer strong but to destroy; 
they neither wrote nor wrought, thought not nor created; 
but, since the field was rank with tares and mildew’d wheat, 
their scything won some praise: Else have they left no trace. 1 

This measured judgement, which is the ripe fruit of a still undisturbed 
detachment from the realities of the Heroic Age, could not have been 
delivered by an Hellenic poet who was bitterly conscious of still living 
in a moral slum made by barbarian successors of ‘the thalassocracy of 
Minos’. Criminality, and not mere futility, is the burden of Hesiod’s 
indictment against a post-Minoan heroic age that, in his day, was still 
haunting a nascent Hellenic Civilization; and, if he had been required 
to give his black picture a ‘caption’, we may guess that he would have 
quoted from the Odyssey 2 the goddess Athena’s comment on Zeus’s talc 
of Aegisthus. 

Kal Xlrjv kciv6 $ ioiKOTt Ktirai SX 49 pip‘ 
u>s dnoXoiro scat aAAor ort? roiaura ye p«'£oi. 3 

Hesiod’s own judgement on the barbarians is indeed a merciless one: 

‘And Father Zeus made yet a third race of mortal men—a Race of 
Bronze, in no wise like unto the Silver, fashioned from ash-stems, 4 
mighty and terrible. Their delight was in the grievous deeds of Ares and 
in the trespasses of Pride (ufjpies). No bread ever passed their lips, but 
their hearts in their breasts were strong as adamant, and none might 
approach them. Great was their strength and unconquerable were the 
arms which grew from their shoulders upon their stalwart frames. Of 
bronze were their panoplies, of bronze their houses, and with bronze 
they tilled the land (dark iron was not yet). These were brought low by 
their own hands and went their way to the mouldering house of chilly 
Hades, nameless. For all their mighty valour, Death took them in his 
dark grip, and they left the bright light of the Sun.’* 

In Posterity’s judgement on the overflowing measure of suffering 
which the barbarians bring upon themselves by their own criminal 


* Bridges, Robert: The Testament of Beauty (Oxford 1929, Clarendon Press), Book I, 
U- S 35 - 55 - 1 Book I, II. 46-47- 

» 'AH too [fearfully] befitting i* the doom that has laid that monster low; thus perish 
any other wretch who dares such deeds ns those.’ The second of these two lines was 
quoted by Scipio Aemilianus when, in his camp beleaguering Numantia, he received 
intelligence of the violent end which Tiberius Gracchus had met at Rome (Plutarch: 
Life of Tiberius Gracchus, chap. 2t). 

4 Ash was the wood from which spear-shafts were made.—A.T.T. 
i Hesiod: Works and Days, II. 143-55. 



A PHANTASY OF HEROISM 75 

follies, 1 this passage in Hesiod’s poem might have stood as the last word, 
had not the poet himself run on as follows: 

'Now when this race also had been covered by Earth, yet a fourth race 
was made, again, upon the face of the All-Mother, by Zeus son of Cronos 
—a better race and more righteous, the divine race of men heroic (dvBp&v 
r/pioiov Oetou y(vos), who are called demigods ('qp.ideoi), a race that was 
aforetime upon the boundless Earth. These were destroyed by evil War 
and dread Battle—some below Seven-Gate Thebes in the land of Cad¬ 
mus, as they fought for the flocks of Oedipus, while others were carried 
for destruction to Troy in ships over the great gulf of the sea, for the sake 
of Helen of the lovely hair. There verily they met their end and vanished 
in the embrace of Death; yet a few there were that were granted a life and 
a dwelling-place, apart from Mankind, by Zeus son of Cronos, who made 
them to abide at the ends of the Earth. So there they abide, with hearts 
free from care, in the Isles of the Blessed beside the deep eddies of Ocean 
Stream—happy heroes, for whom a harvest honey-sweet, thrice ripening 
every year, is yielded by fruitful fields.’* 

What is the relation of this passage to the one that immediately pre¬ 
cedes it, and indeed to the whole catalogue of races in which it is 
imbedded ? This episode breaks the sequence of the catalogue in two 
respects. In the first place the race here passed in review, unlike the pre¬ 
ceding races of gold, silver, and bronze and the succeeding race of iron, 
is not identified with any metal, and, in the second place, all the other 
four races are made to follow one another in a declining order of merit 
which is symbolized in the descending gradation of the metals from gold 
to iron through silver and bronze. Moreover, the destinies of the three 
preceding races after death are consonant with the tenour of their lives 
on Earth. The Race of Gold 'became good spirits (S alpoves ... iadXol) 
by the will of great Zeus—spirits above the ground, guardians of mortal 
men, givers of wealth (for they had gotten even that prerogative of 
kings).’ 3 The inferior Race of Silver still 'gained among mortals the 
name of blessed ones beneath the ground—second in glory; and yet, 
even so, they too are attended with honour’. 4 When we come, however, 
to the Race of Bronze, wc find, as we have seen, that their fate after 
death is passed over in a grimly ominous silence. In a catalogue woven 
on this pattern, we should expect to find the next race condemned, after 
death, to suffer, at the lightest, the torments of the damned in the House 
of Hades; yet, so far from that, wc find at least a chosen few of them 
transported after death, not to Hell, but to Elysium—where they live, 
above ground, the very life that had been lived by the Race of Gold 
before tasting of a death which these supremely favoured heroes are, it 
would seem, to be spared. 

Manifestly the insertion of a Race of Heroes between the Race of 
Bronze and the Race of Iron is an afterthought. Both in form and in 
substance the passages describing the races of these two baser metals 

1 edva iv araaOaXhjmv vtt ip popov aXy< fv ovaiv, — Odyssey, Book 1,1. 34. _ 

> Hesiod: Works and Days, II. 156-73. following Rzach, A.: Httiodi Carmina, edit 10 
altera (Leipzig 1908, Teubner), in excising II. 169-9* as a later variant for II. 172-3- 

J Hesiod: Works and Days, 11. 122-6, following Rzach in excising II. 124-5. 

* Ibid., II. 141-2. 



76 HEROIC AGES 

ought to stand in immediate juxtaposition to one another. If we do 
bring them together by allowing the episode of the heroes to drop out, 
the poem then runs smooth, with no perceptible hiatus at the point where 
we have excised the incongruous parenthesis. The parenthetic heroes 
break the poem’s sequence, symmetry, and sense; and this discord must 
have grated as painfully on the aesthetic sensibilities of the poet as it 
grates on ours. What moved the poet to make this clumsy insertion at 
this cost to his work of art ? The answer must be that the picture, here 
presented, of a Race of Heroes was so vividly impressed on the imagina¬ 
tion of the poet and his public that some place had to be found for it in 
any catalogue of the successive ages in their vista of past history; and 
the irony of the poet's predicament is that this massacre of a work of 
art for the sake of paying tribute to an historical reminiscence turns out 
really to have been an unnecessary atrocity. It was unnecessary because 
the Race of Heroes was already ensconced in the original catalogue under 
the sign of the third metal of the four. In other words, the Race of 
Heroes is identical with the Race of Bronze; and the insertion describing 
the heroes is thus, in truth, not an indispensable supplement, but a 
superfluous doublet. 

The identity of the two races becomes transparent as soon as we com¬ 
pare the two passages. In the first place the Heroes’ unnamed metal 
must, in fact, be bronze, since iron only comes in with their successors, 
while their brazen predecessors have already superseded the earlier 
races of silver and gold; and in truth the Homeric Epic is corroborated 
by the researches of Modern Western archaeologists in setting the 
Achaean heroes of a post-Minoan Volkerwanderung in the techno¬ 
logical environment of the Bronze Age. In the second place the ascrip¬ 
tion of the responsibility for the destruction of the Heroes to the 
ostensibly impersonal demonic forces of ‘War’ and ‘Battle’ is manifestly 
a euphemistic periphrasis for the poet’s previous brutal statement of the 
truth that the Race of Bronze ‘were brought low by their own hands’. 
The nameless fratricidal struggles in which the brazen men liquidate 
themselves are none other than the wars in which the Heroes are 
destroyed at the gates of Thebes and under the walls of Troy—and 
therewith the curtain falls on the war-ridden lives, not only of the Men 
of Bronze, but likewise of the Heroes with the exception of a privileged 
(•lite. The majority of the Heroes, who ‘met their end’ in warfare ‘and 
vanished in the embrace of Death’, are the self-same brazen warriors 
who ‘left the bright light of the Sun’ and ‘went their way to the moulder¬ 
ing house of chilly Hades, nameless’, when ‘Death took them in his 
dark grip’. If we leave out of account Menelaus and the handful of 
other fortunate Heroes whom Zeus, in his sovereign caprice, has elected 
to transport to Elysium, the deeds and sufferings and destinies of the two 
races, as described by the poet in these passages, prove, on examination, 
to be the same. 

This discovery is surprising, because the impression made on our 
minds by the two passages, before we thus analyse them, is one not of 
identity but of contrast; and the difference, as well as the likeness, is 
indeed a reality; but, in distinction from the likeness, which is a likeness 



A PHANTASY OF HEROISM 77 

of statements about alleged matters of fact, the difference is a difference 
of aesthetic and emotional atmosphere. The Race of Bronze and the 
Race of Heroes are the same people seen through different mental glasses: 
a lens of faint yet authentic historical reminiscence and a lens of vivid 
but hallucinatory poetic imagination. A single race has, in fact, been 
portrayed by the poet twice over in two pictures which he has been con¬ 
strained to present side by side because he is afflicted—or endowed— 
with an astigmatic vision which he is unable to reduce to a single focus. 

How has this dual vision arisen ? An answer to this riddle is suggested 
by a literary phenomenon which we have already had occasion to notice 
in another context. 1 We have observed that an historical personage or 
event that happens also to become a character or topic of ‘heroic’ poetry 
or saga acquires, in this ‘other world’ of the barbarian poetic imagination, 
a life of its own whose career, as it develops, is apt to part company with 
the statically authentic historical facts of ‘real life’ until sometimes the 
original identity of the two pictures is almost entirely obscured—as can 
be verified in cases in which the historical truth or falsehood of the 
barbarian poet’s picture can be gauged by comparison with the prosaic 
statements of some historian, belonging to a neighbouring civilization, 
who is, himself, a contemporary of the facts that he has put on record. 
On this analogy we may perhaps explain the puzzling dittography in our 
Hesiodic catalogue of the successive races of men by concluding that, 
in this canto, the poet has played for us the historian’s part as well as 
his own. In his grim delineation of the Race of Bronze he has given 
us, in advance, the prose version of his immediately following poetic 
idyll of a Race of Heroes—a fantasy in which the sordid historical facts 
have undergone their characteristic metamorphosis in the radio-active 
medium of a Homeric poetical tradition to which Hesiod is the heir. 

It would be an error, of course, to suppose that our conscientious 
Hesiod is deliberately laying a glossy coat of moral whitewash over his 
heroes’ crude historical criminality. His presentation of the damning 
truth side by side with an ideal picture is evidence of his naive good 
faith; and, indeed, we have noticed above 2 that the barbarian bard who 
has posthumously made a Hesiod his dupe is quite as ready to paint his 
picture darker than the reality of his living model as he is to paint it 
lighter. The notorious creation, in the Nibelungenlied, of an imaginary 
paladin, Dietrich of Bern, out of an historical Theodoric who, ‘in real 
life’, won Verona by his treacherous murder of Odovaccr, is offset by 
the transformation of respectable historical characters into villains. The 
Classical School of Serb ‘heroic’ poetry, which made the counterpart of 
an imaginary chivalrous Dietrich out of the historical traitor Marko 
Kraljevid, simultaneously made the counterpart of an authentic dastardly 
Theodoric out of the historical paladin Vuk Brankovid. 3 The epic poet|s 
concern is, not for his heroes’ and heroines’ moral reputation, but for his 
poetry’s aesthetic merit; and even in this endeavour, professionally in 
earnest though he is, he is at the same time entirely unselfconscious. 

This admirable unselfconsciousness is one of the secrets of the epic 
poet’s dazzling artistic success; and this triumph of a barbarian art is 

« In V. v. 607-14. 2 On p. 61, above. 1 See V. v. 609. 



78 HEROIC AGES 

the solitary creative achievement amid the welter of catastrophic failures 
which a barbarian war-band brings upon itself when it steps across a 
fallen limes to make a moral slum out of the social ruins among which it 
squats. In politics, in religion, and in all the other fields in which the 
barbarians have shown rudimentary’ signs of possessing creative power 
so long as they have been pent back behind the ft/w^-barrage, 1 these 
rudiments of creativity arc blighted, as we have seen, 2 by the de¬ 
moralization that overtakes the barbarians when the collapse of the limes 
spills them out of Limbo into the Promised Land. In the slum of a bar¬ 
barian successor-state the barbarian’s embryonic gift for poetry is the 
only one of his potentialities that comes to flower; and this bud blossoms 
so wonderfully that it lends the waste-land the illusory appearance of a 
paradise. The barbarian bard’s magically successful art casts over the 
barbarian war-lord’s commonplace misconduct and failure ‘in real life’ 
a glamour that deludes a captivated Posterity—as our physical vision is 
enraptured by the irridescent colours that radiate, in patterns of in¬ 
imitable harmony, over the surface of a broken piece of Roman glass or 
of a puddle of oil that has collected in a pot-hole from the leaking 
sump of some limping car. 3 

In social terms the Heroic Age is a great folly, and an even greater 
crime; but in emotional terms it is a great experience: the thrilling ex¬ 
perience of breaking through a barrier which has baffled the barbarian 
invaders’ forebears for many generations past, and bursting out into an 
apparently boundless world that offers what seem to be infinite possi¬ 
bilities. With one glorious exception, all these possibilities turn out, as 
we have seen, to be Dead Sea fruit; the barbarian w r ar-lords and 
warriors throw away their splendid opportunities in crimes and follies 
that swiftly revenge themselves; yet this sensational completeness of the 
barbarians’ misconduct and failure on the social and political planes 
paradoxically ministers to the success of their bards’ creative work; for 
in art, in illuminating antithesis to ‘practical life’, there is more to be 
made out of failure than out of success. 4 

The exhilaration generated by the experience of the Vdlkerwandcrung 

* See pp. 9 -xo, above. . . a On pp. 46-47, above. 

* To be transfigured by this poetic glamour in the imagination of contemporarie* 
and epigoni was the supreme ambition of the barbarian war-lord—the one prize acces¬ 
sible to him that, in his disillusioned eyes, still shone like gold against the drab foil of a 
material power and wealth which had been proved mockingly unrewarding by a bitter 
experience of tasting their fruits and finding them dust and ashes. The poet’s tenure of 
the keys of the war-lord’s hall of fame, which was the only heaven to which the war-lord 
aspired, conferred on the poet a potential political ‘puli' which the sophisticated war¬ 
lord Mu’iwiyah had the acumen to appreciate and the adroitness to turn to his own 
account (sec Lammens, S.J., Lc Pere H.: fitudes sur le Regne du Calife Mo'duia I" 
(Paris 1908, Geuthnerk pp. 252-66). 

* On this point see V. v. 607-14. This truth is illustrated, not only by the choice of 
themes in the primary epic poetry that is evoked by a barbarian Vdlkerwandcrung, but 
also by the history of the secondary epic poetry in which a sophisticated civilization 
proclaims its admiration for a barbamn art by trying its hand at an artificial reproduction 
of the barbarian poet’s genre. Like the original epic, the literary epic is apt to be the 
swan-song of an age that is petering out in disillusionment and failure—as has been 
pointed out by C. M. Bowra in From Virgil to Milton (London 1945, Macmillan), pp. 
28-32. This creative potentiality’ of failure, which had thus proved itself a gold mine for 
poets who worked it as a vein of inspiration, was also, of course, one of the mysteries 
that had been revealed in the higher religions through the passions of the Prophets and 
the Saints. 



A PHANTASY OF HEROISM 79 

—an exhilaration that breaks down into demoralization in the intoxi¬ 
cated souls of the barbarian men of action—inspires the barbarian poet 
serenely to transmute the memory of his heroes’ wickedness and in¬ 
eptitude into a song that will live on Posterity’s lips. In the enchanted 
realm of a poetry that thus magically transfigures the sordid crimes and 
follies by which it is evoked, the barbarian conquistadores achieve 
vicariously the success that eludes their grasp in real life; and herein the 
bard does the hero an even greater sen-ice than Horace avers. 1 He does 
not merely preserve his subject’s memory; he actually creates his charac¬ 
ter by making dead history blossom into immortal romance; and, while 
the effect, as often as not, on his hero’s moral reputation may be to pre¬ 
sent him as a blacker villain than he has actually shown himself to be 
while he has been rollicking, in flesh and blood, across the stage of 
History, one invariable result of the poet’s artistic alchemy is to enhance 
immeasurably the aesthetic attractiveness of the historical lay figure that 
he has taken as his cobbler’s last. Thanks to the barbarian poet’s 
wizardry the squalid realities of the barbarian warrior’s slum exhale a 
phantasy of heroism that long outlives its ephemeral source in the sump 
of authentic history. 

This pearl of Barbarism is appreciated and appropriated by a Posterity 
that has little use for anything else in the barbarian’s otherwise un¬ 
inviting legacy; and the barbarian bard, in the posthumous literary life 
that is thus conferred on him by the canonization of his works, slily 
avenges his discreditable comrades the barbarian war-lord and warrior 
by investing them with an unmerited reputation through an artistic con¬ 
juring trick. The fascination exercised by heroic poetry over its latter- 
day admirers deludes them, as we have observed, 1 into mistaking an 
Heroic Age which is the changeling child of a poet’s imagination for the 
very different historical reality by which the poet’s creative activity has 
been called into play. The poet’s magic touch conjures a 'light that 
never was, on sea or land’, 3 out of the baleful glare of a conflagration 
kindled by the barbarian incendiaries of a devastated world; and this 
theatrical lighting makes a slum look like Valhalla. 

The earliest victim of this illusion is, as we have seen, 4 the poet of a 
Dark Age which is ‘the Heroic Age’s' sequel. As is manifest in retro¬ 
spect, this later age has no need to be ashamed of a darkness which 
signifies that the barbarian incendiaries’ bonfire has at last burnt itself 
out; and, though, after the expiry of that ghastly artificial illumination, a 
bed of ashes smothers the surface of the flame-seared ground, the Dark 
Age proves to be as creative as 'the Heroic Age’ has been destructive. 
When the fire is extinct and the clamour hushed, the Spirit moves again 
upon the face of the waters; and, in the fullness of time, new life duly 
arises from the abyss to clothe the fertile ash-field with shoots of tender 
green. The poetry of Hesiod is one of these harbingers of a returning 
spring-time; yet this honest chanticleer of the darkness before dawn is 
still so blindly infatuated with a poetry inspired by an act of nocturnal 

* Horace: Comma, Book IV, Ode ix. * On p. 78, above. 

» Wordsworth, William: Elegiac Stanzas suggested by a Picture o] Peele Castle in a 
Storm. * On p. 57. above. 



80 HEROIC AGES ‘ 

incendiarism that he takes on faith, as gospel truth, an imaginary Homeric 
picture of a Race of Heroes and is consequently betrayed into despairing 
of the age of promise into which he himself has been born—without 
realizing that any age of history that is experienced ‘in real life’ is bound 
to seem desperately inferior to an Heroic Age whose idyllic beauty has 
never had any existence outside a barbarian poet's imagination. 

Hesiod’s illusion seems strange, considering that, in his picture of the 
Race of Bronze, he has preserved for us, side by side with his confiding 
reproduction of an Homeric fantasy, a merciless portrait of the barbarian 
as he really is. Yet, even without this clue, the heroic myth can be ex¬ 
ploded by detonating the internal evidence. The Heroes turn out, as we 
have perceived, to live the evil lives and die the cruel deaths of the Race 
of Bronze, and Valhalla turns out likewise to be a slum when we switch 
off all the artificial lights and scrutinize dispassionately, in the sober 
light of day, this poetic idealization of the riotous feasting and turbulent 
fighting that, between them, make up the historical barbarians’ daily 
round and common task. The warriors who qualify for admission to 
Valhalla by losing their lives in battle are in truth identical with the 
demons against whom they are called upon to exercise their prowess as 
members of Odin’s ghostly war-band; and, in perishing from off the face 
of the Earth by mutual destruction, the Vikings have already done their 
best to relieve the World of a pandemonium of their own making by 
staging a ragnarok with an ending that is a happy one from every point 
of view except their own. In the Aesir’s mythical last stand, Odin and 
his divine comitatus are Doppelgtinger of the overwhelming powers of 
darkness to which they are fabled to succumb; for this heroic forlorn 
hope is the cunning sagaman’s version of Odin’s ‘Wild Ride’—a tempes¬ 
tuous rout of unbridled passion that brings doom on any unhappy mortal 
who happens to be caught in its hideous blast. 

The hallucination to which a Hesiod succumbs in the archaic prelude 
to a nascent civilization can also take in a sceptical historian in the 
sophisticated intellectual environment of a civilization that has reached, 
and perhaps passed, its maturity—as is attested by the following passage 
which Gibbon has allowed himself to write in The History of the Decline 
and Fall of the Roman Empire: 

‘The sublime Longinus, who ... in the court of a Syrian queen 
preserved the spirit of ancient Athens, observes and laments [the] 
degeneracy of his contemporaries, which debased their sentiments, en¬ 
ervated their courage, and depressed their talents. "In the same manner,” 
says he, "as some children always remain pigmies, whose infant limbs 
have been too closely confined; thus our tender minds, fettered by the 
prejudices and habits of a just servitude, arc unable to expand themselves, 1 
or to attain that well-proportioned greatness which we admire in the 
Ancients, who, living under a popular government, wrote with the same 
freedom as they acted.” This diminutive stature of Mankind, if we pur- 

* °*' v ' • • • rovroviorov a«ov<o, ra y\ajTr6x0fia, Iv oU oi rrvyuatoi xaXov/u- 

i-oc 6i vfo* vpe^ovrax, oii fioVov rwv iynttcXturjUvotv Tat aiSfyans, dMa teal 

otvapoc [?1 Sid rov ircpiKuutvov rots oat/iaot Stoftov, oCrag, anaoav tovMlav, xav f) 
dutaiOTdrrj, VL'X’li yXwrroKOttov xai xotro k ai- nf anoStvruro &*oua>Ap Longi¬ 
nus l?]: / 7 <pl Ytfov t. chap, xliv, § 5. 



A PHANTASY OF HEROISM 81 

sue the metaphor, was daily sinking below the old standard, and the 
Roman World was indeed peopled by a race of pigmies, when the fierce 
giants of the North broke in and mended the puny breed. They restored 
a manly spirit of freedom; and, after the revolution of ten centuries, 
freedom became the happy parent of taste and science.’ 1 

After this awe-inspiring exhibition of the barbarian poet-conjurer’s 
power to hoax a giant eighteenth-century intellect, we can hardly be 
surprised to see a nineteenth-century philosopher-mountebank launch¬ 
ing his myth of a salutarily barbarian ‘Nordic Race’ whose blood— 
unique in this among all brews of human ichor—acts as an infallible 
elixir of youth when it is injected into the veins of an ‘effete’ society. 2 Yet 
we may still be cut to the heart as we watch the lively French aristocrat’s 
political jeu d'esprit being keyed up into a racial myth by the criminal 
prophets of a demonic German Neobarbarism that surpasses in wicked¬ 
ness the original Barbarism which it seeks to revive in the measure in which 
a wilful apostate from a higher religious faith surpasses in perversity 
the invincibly ignorant heathen. 3 


(II) A GENUINE HUMBLE SERVICE 

While the criminality of a barbarian Vdlkerwanderung can thus work 
posthumous moral havoc on the strength of its brilliant poetic mas¬ 
querade as an idyllic heroism, there have also been occasions on which 
an unbridled barbarian interloper has performed a humble service for 
Posterity that proves, in retrospect, to have been of genuine value. At 
the transition from the civilizations of the first generation to those of the 
second, the interloping barbarian war-bands that established themselves 
in a dying civilization’s former domain did in some cases provide a link 
between the defunct civilization and its newborn successor, as, in the 
subsequent transition from the civilizations of the second generation to 
those of the third, a link was provided by chrysalis-churches created by 
the secondary civilizations’ internal proletariats. 4 The Syriac and Hellenic 
civilizations, for instance, were thus linked with an antecedent Minoan 
Civilization through this Minoan Society’s external proletariat, and the 
Hittite Civilization stood in the same historical relation to an antecedent 
Sumeric Civilization, the Indie Civilization to an antecedent Indus 
Culture (supposing that this Indus Culture were to turn out to have 
been independent of the Sumeric Civilization), and the Sinic Civilization 
to an antecedent Shang Culture (supposing that the progress of archaeo¬ 
logical research were to confirm this Shang Culture’s title to rank as a 
full-blown civilization of the first generation). 

The modesty of the service that these particular barbarian war-bands 

» Gibbon, E.: TheHiitoryof the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap, ti, ad fin, 

1 The fallacy of ascribing to societies a senescence that is a property' of individual 
living organisms has been criticized in IV. iv. 7-13. 

J Count de Gobineau’s fantasy and its consequences in real life have been touched 
upon in II. i. 216-xo. 

* Sec the table of primitive societies, civilizations, and higher religions, nrranged in 
serial order, facing p. 47 of volume vii. 



82 HEROIC AGES 

performed is brought out by our comparison of it with the role of 
the chrysalis-churches. While the Internal Proletariat that builds the 
churches, like the External Proletariat that breeds the war-bands, is the 
offspring of a psychological secession from a disintegrating civilization, 
and while neither branch of the Proletariat carries this repudiation of 
its former cultural allegiance so far as to make no use at all of the 
Dominant Minority’s cultural heritage in creating the rudiments of a 
new culture with a distinctive character of its own, the Internal Prole¬ 
tariat is apt to make a much greater success than the External Proletariat 
ever makes of the cultural enterprise of 'spoiling the Egyptians’. In the 
higher religions which had been the Internal Proletariat’s chefs-d'auvre, 
the cultural spoils of a disintegrating civilization had been transmuted 
into new creations to a far greater extent, and with a far more telling 
effect, than in the new social and political institutions, the new religions, 
or even the new poetry of the barbarians beyond the pale; and this 
difference in degree of cultural assimilative power could be gauged by 
the difference iii the strength of the link between a successor civilization 
and its predecessor when this link had been supplied by a chrysalis- 
church and when it had been supplied by a barbarian war-band. 

For example, the Orthodox Christian and the Western Civilization, 
which were affiliated to the antecedent Hellenic Civilization through the 
Christian Church, had always been on far more intimate terms with their 
Hellenic predecessor than the Hellenic Civilization ever had been with 
a Minoan predecessor with which it had been affiliated solely through 
the Achaean barbarians. Through this non-conductivc barbarian 
medium the Hellenic Civilization’s reception of the antecedent Minoan 
Civilization’s posthumous radiation of its cultural influence had been 
so faint and fragmentary that, in contrast to the Christian civilizations' 
intimacy with an antecedent Hellenism, the Hellenic Civilization gave 
the impression of being oblivious of its Minoan predecessor. It was, in¬ 
deed, so little conscious of its Minoan antecedents that it might almost 
be mistaken—as its two ‘Hellenistic’ Christian successors never could 
be—for one of those civilizations of the earliest generation that had had 
no previous civilization at all in their cultural background. The Hellenic 
Society’s living cultural heritage from the Achaean barbarians included 
no institutions of Minoan or post-Minoan origin, and no authentic con¬ 
temporary records of any periods of the antecedent civilization’s history. 
The sole fount of Hellenic knowledge of a pre-Hellenic past was the 
Homeric Epic; and, for the history of an antecedent civilization, the 

S bequeathed by barbarians is a doubly deceptive source of in¬ 
ion. In general the barbarian poet creates his work of art by taking 
unlimited liberties with the record of authentic facts; 1 and, in particular, 
this intuitive artistic criterion governing the poet’s treatment of his 
subject leads him to ignore the moribund civilization whose death 
agonies have precipitated the barbarian Volkerwanderung as a matter 
of historical fact, but whose tragedy is incomprehensible to barbarian 
minds. 2 Eschewing such intractable matter, the barbarian bard presents 
the barbarian Heroic Age in vacuo , with no more than a casual reference, 

1 See V. v. 607-14. «nd pp. 77-79, above. a Sec V. v. 610-14. 



A GENUINE HUMBLE SERVICE 83 

here and there, to the mighty carcass on which the bard’s vulture- 
heroes have gathered together to make their carrion feasts. 

On this showing, the service with which we have credited the 
Achacans and the other barbarians of their generation who played the 
same transmissive role might seem at first sight to dwindle almost to 
vanishing-point. What did it really amount to? Its reality becomes evi¬ 
dent when we compare the destinies of those civilizations of the second 
generation that were affiliated to predecessors by this tenuous barbarian 
link with the destinies of the rest of the secondary civilizations. As we 
have observed in previous contexts, 1 any secondary civilizations that 
were not affiliated to their primary predecessors through these pre¬ 
decessors’ external proletariats were affiliated to them through their 
dominant minorities; and these were the only two alternative lines of 
affiliation in this chapter of history, since no chrysalis-churches came 
out of the rudimentary higher religions—a worship of Tammuz and 
Ishtar and a worship of Osiris and Isis—that had been created or 
adopted by some of the primary civilizations’ internal proletariats. 
Secondary civilizations affiliated through external proletariats and 
secondary civilizations affiliated through dominant minorities are the 
only civilizations of this generation that are known to us; and, when we 
compare these two types, we observe a difference in their destinies corres¬ 
ponding to a difference in their characters. 

In character these two types of secondary civilization stand at oppo¬ 
site poles. Whereas those secondary civilizations that were affiliated 
through external proletariats were connected with their predecessors by 
a link that is so tenuous that it hardly serves to distinguish them from 
civilizations of the primary class that had no predecessors at all of their 
own social species, the rest of the secondary civilizations, which were 
affiliated through dominant minorities, were, on the other hand, so 
closely welded thereby to their predecessors of the first generation that 
we have found ourselves wondering whether we ought not to treat their 
histories as mere epilogues to those of the antecedent civilizations in¬ 
stead of according them the status of separate civilizations with histories 
of their own. 2 Whichever of the two possible answers to this question 
may be the nearer to the truth, there is no ambiguity about the destinies 
of these ‘supra-affiliated secondary civilizations’ or ‘dead trunks of 
primary civilizations’—to give the societies of this type their two alter¬ 
native labels. There were three known examples of the type—the 
Babylonic Civilization, affiliated to the Sumcric Civilization, and the 
Yucatcc and Mcxic civilizations, affiliated to the Mayan—and none of 
these three ‘supra-affiliated secondary civilizations’ had come to serve, 
in its disintegration, as the chrysalis of any living higher religion. All the 
living higher religions had been created by the internal proletariats of 
other civilizations of the second generation—the Syriac Civilization, the 
Hellenic, the Indie, the Sinic—whose own affiliation with their pre¬ 
decessors of the first generation had run, not through the Dominant 
Minority, but through the External Proletariat. 

« In I. i. 115-18 and 131-2. and VII. vii. 421. above. 

* Thi* question has been raised in I. i. x 17-18 and 133-6. 



8 4 HEROIC AGES 

If we call to mind, in this connexion, our conclusion, reached in the 
preceding Part of this Study, 1 that our serial order of chronologically 
successive types of society is at the same time an ascending order of 
value, in which the higher religions would be the highest term so far 
attained, we shall now bbserve that the barbarian chrysalises of civiliza¬ 
tions of the second generation would have to their credit the honour of 
having participated in the higher religions' procreation. They would 
have been, so to speak, the higher religions’ ‘grandparents’; 2 for the 
higher religions that had come to flower had all been created by the 
internal proletariats of civilizations of the second generation which had 
been affiliated with their own predecessors of the first generation through 
barbarian war-bands. These contributions of these barbarians to the 
geneses of the higher religions can be conveyed most simply and clearly 
in the form of genealogical tables. 


The Minonn Civilization 

The post-Minoan barbarians 
(Philistines, Achaeans) 


The Syriac Civilization 
Istam 

(derived from 
the Syriac 
Civilization 
through ita 
internal pro¬ 
letariat) 


The Hellenic 


The Indus Culture 

The post-Indus Culture 
barbarians (Aryas) 

Civilization The Indie Civilization 


Christianity 
(derived from 
the Hellenic 
Civilization 
through it* 
internal pro¬ 
letariat) 


The MahflyAna Hindi 


. ina 
(derived from 
the Hellenic 
and Indie 
Civilizations 
through their 
internal pro¬ 
letariats) 


uiam 
(derived from 
the Indie 
Civilization 
through its 
internal pro¬ 
letariat) 


If the failures of the civilizations of the first generation to produce 
full-fledged higher religions had been followed only by the geneses of 
secondary civilizations affiliated to their primary predecessors solely 
through these predecessors’ dominant minorities, the actual subsequent 
sterility of all the secondary civilizations of this type suggests that a 
second opportunity for the creation of higher religions might then never 
have presented itself. The actual recurrence of the opportunity, and the 
flowering, in this second spring, of Christianity, Islam, the MahaySna, 
and Hinduism, seem to have been historical consequences of the geneses 
of other secondary civilizations that were affiliated with their primary 
predecessors through barbarians; and these barbarian foster-parents of 
the Syriac, Hellenic, and Indie civilizations would thus appear to have 
played a positive, and perhaps indispensable, part in Mankind’s gradual 
and laborious advance towards the goal of human endeavours. 

Yet, when we have taken due note of this service and estimated it at its 
full value, we shall find ourselves still rating it as a modest one on a com¬ 
parative view. Our conclusion that the role of serving as a cultural 
chrysalis is the highest to which any barbarian war-band had ever 

1 See VII. vii. 448-9. 

* For the sake of brevity, we may perhaps allow ourselves here the perilous licence 
of describing a process of social growth in terms of the procreation of organic life— 
without forgetting that, in truth, societies are not living organisms (sec III. iii. 219-23 
and IV. iv. n-12). 



A GENUINE HUMBLE SERVICE 8 S 

attained presents a significant contrast to our conclusion 1 that a church, 
when it had played the same role, had been digressing from its proper 
course on a charitable errand which, at the best, would delay, and, at 
the worst, might frustrate, the accomplishment of the church’s own 
proper spiritual mission. If this role is a pis-aller for a performer that 
plays it so admirably as a church does play the chrysalis-role when it 
charitably condescends to it, the very much less effective performance 
of the same part by a barbarian war-band cannot be rated as being 
anything more than modestly meritorious. And even this slight com¬ 
pensation for the enormous social havoc that ever}' barbarian war-band 
had worked had been paid only by a tiny minority of the war-bands that 
had made their devastating cyclone-passages through history. 

Even at the transition from the first to the second generation of civiliza¬ 
tions the barbarians bred by the primary civilizations’ disintegration did 
not by any means always play even the moderately creative part of 
fostering a secondary civilization’s birth. 

The Hyksos barbarians who assembled their forces in Palestine and 
the Philistine and Achaean barbarian foster-fathers of the Syriac and 
Hellenic civilizations produced, for example, the very opposite of a 
creative effect in their impacts on the Egyptiac World. In these Nilotic 
escapades, so far from promoting the genesis of a new civilization, the 
barbarians performed the most untoward miracle of galvanizing a mori¬ 
bund civilization into a long protracted life-in-death by goading it into 
a fanatically archaistic reaction against their provocative trespasses. The 
Hyksos’ successful invasion of the Egyptiac World from an Asian no- 
man’s-land* blighted any creative potentialities that might have been 
latent in an embryonic Osirian Church by driving the internal proletariat 
into the arms of the dominant minority in an union sacrie which achieved 
the forcible expulsion of the interloping barbarians at the cost of sterili¬ 
zing a nascent higher religion; 1 and the Philistines' and Achaeans’unsuc¬ 
cessful attempt to invade the Egyptiac World some four hundred years 
after the eviction of the Hyksos had a comparably maleficent effect on 
the course of Egyptiac history. By evoking Ramses Ill’s tour de force of 
flinging them bade from the coast of the Delta, ‘the Sea Peoples’ not only 
provoked the Egyptiac Society into expending the last reserves of its 
already depleted energy; they inflicted on their victim a still graver in¬ 
jury by reinflaming in him a fanaticism that kept the patient anaemically 
alive at a moment when the senile Egyptiac body social was being offered 
a second chance of a merciful release from life through the natural decay 
of ‘the New Empire’. The inopportune intervention of the Hyksos had 
already doubled the term of the Egyptiac Society’s penal servitude in the 
prison-house of a universal state by conjuring up ‘the New Empire’ to 
repeat the course which ‘the Middle Empire’ had by then already run. 
The equally inopportune intervention of ‘the Sea Peoples’ cheated 
the prisoner of the belated discharge that he might have expected to 


1 In VII. vii. 447-8. t 

3 Alternative views on the Hyksos’ provenance are noticed in the note on Chronology 
in x. 167-212. 
s See I. i. 143-5. 



86 HEROIC AGES 

receive after the expiry of the second instalment of his life-in-death 
sentence. 1 

On this showing, we may put down to the barbarians’ account the 
difference between the sequels to Egyptiac and Sumeric history. While 
the provocativencss of the Hyksos and the turbulence of 'the Sea 
Peoples’ deterred a moribund Egyptiac society from duly dying and 
thereby leaving the field free for a successor to take its place, the 
Sumeric Society was more fortunate in being afflicted on its deathbed 
with less stimulating barbarian parasites. The Mitanni barbarians, en 
route from the Eurasian Steppe to Syria, seem to have passed the Land 
of Shinar by, and the raid in which the Hittite barbarians sacked Babylon 
seems to have been as brief as it was devastating. The maggots that 
fastened on the carcass of a moribund Sumeric Society were the sluggish 
Kassites, whose intrusion did not arouse sufficient antagonism to arrest 
the process of nature. Unimpeded by the Kassitc incubus, the trans¬ 
formation of a moribund Sumeric Society into a nascent Babylonic 
Society, through the agency of the Sumeric dominant minority, is 
gradually accomplished before our eyes; and this spectacle raises the 
question whether the Egyptiac Society might not have succeeded in 
similarly making way for a new society of the ‘supra-affiliated’ type 
exemplified in the Babylonic Civilization, if only, at the psychologically 
favourable moment, when ‘the Middle Empire’ was in extremis, the 
Egyptiac World had had the good fortune to be invaded, not, as was its 
actual fate, by the perversely stimulating Hyksos, but by those Kassite- 
like Libyans who eventually drifted in, after ‘the Sea Peoples’ had come 
and gone, so uneventfully that their intrusion failed to produce the usual 
bout of militant Egyptiac xenophobia. 

If the inauspicious influence of the Hyksos and ‘the Sea Peoples’ on 
the course of Egyptiac history has to be set against the merit with which 
the barbarians of the first breed are to be credited for their service as 
foster-parents of creative secondary civilizations, what verdict are we 
to pass on those barbarians of the second breed who were part of the 
offspring of the secondary* civilizations in their disintegration ? While the 
internal proletariats of the creative secondary civilizations were bringing 
the living higher religions to birth, a fresh litter of barbarian war-bands 
was being spawned by the external proletariats of secondary civilizations 
of both the creative and the uncreative type. If we are right in regarding 
the epiphany of the higher religions as being the highest reach of Man¬ 
kind’s progress so far, we shall have to pass the same verdict on the 
second crop of barbarian war-bands that we have passed on the third crop 
of secular civilizations. Our verdict on these tertiary civilizations that 
broke out of chrysalis-churches has been that, at the best, they were 
‘vain repetitions of the heathen’ 2 and, at the worst, pernicious back- 
slidings from the ideals and endeavours of the higher religions for which 
the creative secondary civilizations had served as chrysalises. 3 In foster¬ 
ing the birth of the higher religions, those chrysalis-civilizations of the 

1 Thi* recurrent galvanization of a moribund Egyptiac Society into renewed bout* 
of life-in-death by repeated blows from alien assailants has been noticed in VI. vii. 
49 - 50 - * Matt. vi. i See VII. vii. 445. 



A GENUINE HUMBLE SERVICE 87 

second generation had fulfilled the highest mission of which their species 
was capable, and had thereby rendered superfluous any further reproduc¬ 
tion of their kind. On the same line of reasoning, any further reproduction 
of barbarian war-bands must be pronounced to be superfluous after one 
litter of war-bands had fulfilled the highest mission open to their kind 
by fostering the birth of the chrysalis-civilizations. 

This anticipatory judgement by analogy is confirmed by the evidence 
of the secondary barbarians’ actual histories; for these barbarians of the 
second breed had had no opportunity of performing even the modestly 
creative role of their predecessors the barbarian foster-fathers of the 
Syriac, Hellenic, and Indie civilizations. The secondary barbarians whose 
genesis had been coeval with the epiphany of the living higher religions 
had faded out ingloriously in the presence of these great lights. 1 The 
dayspring from on liigh 

restinxit Stellas, exortus ut aetherius sol. 1 

If this is our verdict on the barbarians of the second breed, what are we 
to say of the barbarians of a third breed that had been generated by the 
disintegration of civilizations of the third generation? At the time of 
writing it looked, as we have already observed, 3 as if these latter-day 
barbarians were all fated to be swept off the board by the irresistibly 
superior military force of a mechanically armed Western Civilization 
whose own doom likewise might be heralded by the military triumph of 
a technology in which a Modem Western Man had wilfully put his 
treasure. In a Westernizing World in the Age of the World Wars the 
formidable barbarism—and this was formidable indeed—was an archa- 
istic Neobarbarism that was menacing a hard-pressed society, not from 
outside, but from within. 4 

This Modern Western Neobarbarism has come to our attention in 
another context. 5 Our subject in the present Part of this Study has been 
the less sinister Barbarism that is a perversion, not of a civilization in 
decay, but of a primitive society whose traditional way of life has been 
broken up by a decadent civilization’s impact; and the conclusion that 
we have reached is that a barbarian war-band spawned by a disintegrat¬ 
ing civilization’s external proletariat, like a universal state constructed 
by a dominant minority, achieves its highest possible destiny in meeting 
a fate that we should have accounted a supreme disaster if it had over¬ 
taken any of the higher religions. Whereas a church puts its mission in 
jeopardy by serving as a chrysalis, a war-band, like a universal state, 
fulfills its mission by immolating itself as a Phoenix in order that a new 
and higher life may spring from its quickening ashes. 6 The barbarian 
war-bands that had ‘made history’ were those few that had died in giving 
birth to civilizations that had died in their turn to give birth to higher 
religions; for in the higher religions God had revealed to Mankind— 
through a glass, darkly 7 —a gleam of the light of His countenance. 8 


1 On this point, see I. i. 58-62 and 440. n. 2. 

* Lucretius: De Rerum Natura, Book 111 , 1 . 1044. 


See V. v. 


4 For this rolc^of a universal state, see VI. vii. 
’ 1 Cor. xiii. 12. 


J In V. v. 332-4. 

Ibid. 

. 6; xliv. 3; lxxxix. is: *c. 8. 



IX 


CONTACTS BETWEEN 
CIVILIZATIONS IN SPACE 

(Encounters between Contemporaries) 

A. AN EXPANSION OF THE FIELD OF STUDY 


(I) THE SELF-TRANSCENDENCE OF 
CIVILIZATIONS 


J N the three immediately preceding parts of this book' we have followed 
up our general study of the problem, nature, and process of the dis¬ 
integrations of civilizations by making particular studies of the institu¬ 
tions created by each of the three factions into which the body social of a 
disintegrating civilization splits up. We have studied successively the 
universal states, the universal churches, and the barbarian war-bands 
that arc the characteristic creations of the dominant minorities and the 
internal and external proletariats of societies that have convicted them¬ 
selves of having broken down by falling into schism; and the conclusion 
of these three supplementary historical inquiries would have brought us 
to the end of our study of History itself if our initial working hypothesis 
that civilizations are intelligible fields of study 1 had proved to hold good 
for a study of all phases of their histories. 

Actually we have found that a civilization can be studied intelligibly 
in isolation so long as we are considering its genesis, its growth, or its 
breakdown. Indeed, the historical evidence that has presented itself in 
our empirical survey of breakdowns has seemed to warrant the conclu¬ 
sion that the breakdown of a civilization is invariably due to some inward 
failure of self-determination and never due to blows delivered by exter¬ 
nal agencies . 3 After passing, however, from our study of breakdowns to 
our study of disintegrations, we have found ourselves unable to under¬ 
stand this last phase of a broken-down civilization’s history without 
extending our mental range of vision, beyond the bounds of the disinte¬ 
grating civilization itself, to take account of the impact of external 
forces . 4 Even if we ignore the tell-tale label that we have affixed to the 
barbarians beyond a disintegrating civilization’s limes, and decide to 
treat this ‘External Proletariat’ as an integral part of the society on 
which it preys—on the ground that the barbarian is not so much an 
alien as an alienated proselyte from a primitive way of life 3 —we cannot 
deny the alien origin of those elements in an internal proletariat that 
have been incorporated through conquests at the expense of an alien 
civilization, and cannot overlook the importance of the part that has been 

I Parts VI-VIII. 

1 The considerations that have led us to work on this hypothesis up to this point have 
been set out in I. i. 17-50. > See IV. iv, passim . 

4 Sec V. v. 339-40. i See V. v. 294-210 and VIII, passim. 



THE SELF-TRANSCENDENCE OF CIVILIZATIONS 89 
played by creative inspirations from this alien source in the geneses of 
some of those higher religions that the Internal Proletariat has brought 
to birth. 1 

Thus the history of a single civilization ceases to be intelligible in 
isolation when it enters its disintegration-phase; and this discovery that 
our initial working hypothesis is not valid for the study of all historical 
situations has been confirmed by our subsequent investigations into 
universal states, universal churches, and heroic ages; for each of these 
investigations has carried us beyond the limits, in both Space and Time, 
of the particular civilizations whose declines and falls have generated 
the institutions that we have been investigating. Our conclusion has been 
that the barbarians bred by the disintegration of one civilization have 
made a mark on history in so far as they have succeeded in fostering the 
birth of another civilization which eventually, after breaking down and 
disintegrating in its turn, has ministered to the rise of one of the higher 
religions by providing a framework for it in the shape of a universal 
state. Universal states, like barbarian war-bands, have made their mark 
by unintentionally and unconsciously working, not for themselves, but 
for other beneficiaries; and these beneficiaries have all been alien in the 
sense of being foreign to the particular civilization in the history of 
whose disintegration the particular universal state has been an episode. 
The higher religions have proved to be new societies of a different 
species from the civilizations under the aegis of whose universal states 
they have made their epiphanies; and, in so far as universal states have 
not made their mark by performing services for universal churches, 
they have made it by performing them for barbarians or for alien 
civilizations. 

These alien civilizations, like the barbarians beyond the pale, have 
been certified as being alien by the simple and obvious geographical fact 
that their places of origin have lain outside the frontiers of the universal 
state on whose domain they have eventually trespassed and whose in¬ 
stallations and institutions they have taken over. Yet some—and these 
not the least notable—of the higher religions that have made their 
epiphany inside those frontiers have been no less alien on that account, 
for their adherents have felt themselves, and been felt by their pagan 
neighbours, to be ‘in but not of’ the disintegrating society within whose 
body social, in its universal state, the religion has made its first appear¬ 
ance; and, as we have just reminded ourselves, this aloofness, where it 
has displayed itself, has been a psychological expression of the historical 
fact that the source of the religion’s creative inspiration has been alien 
to the tradition of the society within whose universal state the new 
religion has first presented itself to Mankind. The Roman Empire 
provided an Hellenic-made cradle for a Syriac-inspired Christianity, 
while the Kushan barbarian successor-state of the Bactrian Greek 
Empire provided a likewise Hellenic-made cradle for an Indic-inspired 
Mahayana; and, though it is true, on the other hand, that, unlike 
Christianity and the Mahayana, Islam and Hinduism each drew its 
inspiration from a civilization that provided it with its political cradle as 
» See I. i. 57 and V. v. 359-63. 



90 AN EXPANSION OF THE FIELD OF STUDY 
well, it is also true that, in the geneses of these two higher religions like¬ 
wise, there had been a previous chapter in which more than one civiliza¬ 
tion had been concerned. A Syriac-inspired Islam and its Syriac-made 
cradle the Caliphate were Syriac reactions on the religious and on the 
political plane to a foregoing intrusion of Hellenism on the Syriac 
World; and a subsequent intrusion of Hellenism on the Indie World had 
similarly evoked both an Indic-inspired Hinduism and its Indic-made 
cradle the Guptan Empire. It thus appears that the genesis of each of 
the higher religions that were still alive in the twentieth century of the 
Christian Era becomes intelligible only when we expand our field of 
study from the ambit of a single civilization to embrace encounters 
between two civilizations or more. 1 


(II) BIRTHPLACES OF RELIGIONS IN 
MEETINGPLACES OF CIVILIZATIONS 

The importance of the part played in the geneses of higher religions by 
encounters between different civilizations is indicated by one of the 
commonplaces of historical geography which is as remarkable as it is 
familiar. When we mark down the birthplaces of the higher religions 
on a map, we find them clustering in and round two relatively small 
patches 1 of the total land-surface of the Old World—on the one hand the 
Oxus-Jaxartes Basin and on the other hand Syria (in the broad sense in 
which this term had been used, in the vocabulary of physical geography, 
to cover an area bounded by the North Arabian Steppe, the Mediter¬ 
ranean Sea, and the southern escarpments of the Anatolian and Armenian 
plateaux). 3 The Oxus-Jaxartes Basin was the birthplace of the Mah3y5na 
in the form in which this religion spread from there over the Far 
Eastern World; and, before that, it had been the birthplace of Zoroas¬ 
trianism—as appeared to be generally agreed among Modern Western 
scholars, however widely they might differ in their dating of the epiphany 
of the Prophet Zarathustra. In Syria, Christianity acquired at Antioch 
the form in which it spread from there over the Hellenic World as a 
new religion, after having made its first appearance, as a variety of 
Pharisaic Judaism, in Galilee. Judaism itself and the sister religion of the 
Samaritans arose in Southern Syria, in the hill country between the 
Mediterranean coastal plain and the Jordan canon. The Monothclcte 
Christianity of the Maronites and the Hakim-worshipping Shi'ism of 

1 This conclusion has been anticipated in V. v. 372-6. The same point is made in a 
letter, dated the 16th December, 1950, and published in The A'etc York Timet of the 
20th December, 1950, from Professor Th. H. von Laue of Swarthmorc College, Penn¬ 
sylvania, in which this Western historian contends that the current competition between 
rival cultures and ideologies in a coalescing Oikoumcni cannot be made intelligible to 
students of History in the United States if their field of study is confined to the history 
of their own Western Civilization. a See xi, maps 21 a and b. 

1 It will be seen that Syria, in this physical sense of the term, is approximately con¬ 
terminous with the combined area of four successor-states of the Ottoman Empire— 
Syria, Transjordan, the Lebanon, and Palestine—that were carved out in the peace- 
settlement following the General War of a.d. 1914-18. After the close of the General 
War of A.D. 1939-45, Palestine was partitioned de facto between a new Jewish state 
which took the name ‘Israel', a Transjordan which re-named itself 'Jordan', and an 
Egypt which made a lodgment in the south-west comer of the partitioned territory. 



BIRTHPLACES OF RELIGIONS 91 

the Druses both came to birth in Central Syria—the Druse Church in the 
fastnesses of Mount Hermon and the Maronite Church in those of the 
Lebanon. 

This geographical concentration of the birthplaces of higher religions 
becomes still more conspicuous when we extend our horizon to take in 

Z 'ons adjacent to the two core-areas. Both the Nestorian and the 
nophysite variety of the Syriac version of a Hellenized Christianity 
took shape in and round Urfa-Edessa, in the Mesopotamian prolonga¬ 
tion of Syria towards the East between the North Arabian Steppe and 
Mount Masius, while the HijazI prolongation of Syria towards the 
South, along the highlands between the Red Sea coastal plain and the 
steppes of the Najd, saw the birth, at Mecca and Medina, of a Christian 
heresy which became the new religion of Islam. The Shi'i heretical form 
of Islam, like the Manichaean heretical form of Zoroastrianism,' was 
born on the eastern shore of the North Arabian Steppe, in a borderland 
between ‘the Desert’ and ‘the Sown’ in which the radiation of religious 
influences from Syria and the Hij2z through the conductive medium of 
the Steppe impinged upon the Euphratean marches of Tr5q. When we 
similarly extend the radius of our observation of tire Oxus-Jaxartcs Basin, 
we locate the birthplace of the MahaySna, in its first appearance as a 
variation on the philosophy of Primitive Buddhism, in the adjacent 
Basin of the Indus; the birthplace of this Primitive Buddhism in the 
Middle Ganges Basin, and the birthplace of a post-Buddhaic Hinduism 
in the same quarter of the Indian Sub-Continent. 

What is the explanation of these remarkable facts ? When wc look into 
the characteristics of the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin and Syria and compare 
them with one another, we perceive a feature, prominent in both, which 
accounts for their historic role in the geneses of higher religions and 
makes it clear that the likeness between their histories had been the out¬ 
come, not of some freakish play of Chance, but of an underlying likeness 
between their geographical locations. 

This prominent common feature of Syria and the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin 
is the capacity, with which each of them had been endowed by Nature, 
for serving as a ‘roundabout’ where traffic coming in from any point of 
the compass could be switched to any other point of the compass in 
any number of alternative combinations and permutations . 2 On the 
Syrian ‘roundabout’, routes converged from the Nile Basin, from the 
Mediterranean, from Anatolia with its South-East European continental 
hinterland, from the Tigris-Euphrates Basin, and from an Arabian Steppe 
which, in the purview of human geography, may be regarded as ‘a water¬ 
less sea’ in virtue of its sea-like cultural conductivity . 3 On the Central 
Asian ‘roundabout’, similarly, routes converged from the Tigris- 
Euphrates Basin via the Iranian Plateau, from India through the passes 
over the Hindu Kush, from the Far East via the Tarim Basin, and 
from an adjacent Eurasian Steppe that had taken the place, and inherited 

< See V. v. 575-80. 

1 This function of the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin in the human geography of the Old World 
has been noticed in V. v. 131-40. 

3 This analogy between the Steppe and the Sea has been noticed in I. i. 64; III. 
iii. 7-8, 278, n. i, 391-4, and 399. 



92 AN EXPANSION OF THE FIELD OF STUDY 

the conductivity, of a now desiccated ‘Second Mediterranean’ whose 
former presence there was attested by its fragmentary survival in the 
Caspian, the Sea of Aral, and Lake Balkash. 

The role for which Nature had thus designed these two potential 
traffic-centres had actually, as we know, been played by each of them 
again and again during the five or six thousand years that had passed 
since the emergence of the earliest civilizations. Syria had been the scene 
of encounters between the Sumeric and Egyptiac civilizations before the 
dissolution of the Sumeric Civilization in the seventeenth century B.C.; 
between the Egyptiac, abortive First Syriac, Hittite, and Minoan 
civilizations from the sixteenth to the twelfth century b.c.; between 
the Syriac, Babylonic, Egyptiac, and Hellenic civilizations and a fossil 
remnant of the Hittite Civilization from the twelfth century B.c. to the 
seventh century of the Christian Era; between the Syriac, Orthodox 
Christian, and Western Christian civilizations from the seventh to the 
thirteenth century of the Christian Era; and between the Arabic, 
Iranic, and Western since the thirteenth century, while the Nomadic 
Civilization of the Afrasian and Eurasian steppes has been an additional 
party to all these encounters. 1 The corresponding record of Central 
Asia’s geographical service as a cultural meeting-point would also be 
impressive if Syria’s record were not so extraordinary. The Oxus- 
Jaxartes Basin had been the scene of encounters between the Syriac and 
Indie civilizations from the sixth century b.c. to the eighth century of 
the Christian Era; between the Syriac, Indie, Hellenic, and Sinic from 
the fourth century b.c. to the fifth century of the Christian Era; and 
between the Syriac Civilization, the main body of the Far Eastern 
Civilization, and the Tantric Mahayanian Buddhist fossil of a by-then- 
cxtinct Indie Civilization from the fifth century of the Christian Era to 
the thirteenth. 

These series of encounters between divers civilizations on Syrian and 
on Central Asian ground, which had borne spiritual fruit in the births 
of higher religions, had been registered on the political plane in the 
repeated inclusion of each of these two peculiarly ‘numiniferous’ regions 
in universal states, or in other empires performing similar social func¬ 
tions, that had been thrown up by these colliding civilizations in the 
course of their histories. 

Syria appears to have been included alternately in the Sumeric ‘Empire 
of the Four Quarters’ and in the Egyptiac ‘Middle Empire’ from the 
twenty-first to the seventeenth century b.c.; in the seventeenth century 
it formed part of a Hyksos successor-state of ‘the Empire of the Four 
Quarters’ which had flooded over the derelict domain of ‘the Middle 
Empire’ and had established its headquarters in the Nile Delta; from 
the sixteenth to the fourteenth century B.c. it was included in ‘the New 
Empire’ of Egypt; in the thirteenth century b.c. it was partitioned 
between this ‘New Empire’ of Egypt and the Hittite Power; in the 
eighth and seventh centuries b.c. it was incorporated progressively into 
the Assyrian Empire, and in the sixth century it was annexed in its 

1 These encounters between a number of civilizations on Syrian ground have been 
noticed, in passing, in V. v. 117-18 and 488. 



BIRTHPLACES OF RELIGIONS 93 

entirety (including the southern principalities of Judah, Edom, and 
Moab, which had just escaped failing under the Assyrian yoke) to a 
Neo-Babylonian Empire which, in the course of the same century, was 
swallowed up, entire, in the vaster empire of the Achaemenidae. From 
the fourth to the second century b . c . Syria was a bone of contention 
between the Achaemcnids’ Seleucid and Ptolemaic successor-states; 
but in the last century b . c . it was politically reunited, without being 
liberated from alien rule, through being annexed to the Roman Empire, 
and thereafter it continued to form part of the Roman imperial body 
politic for seven hundred years—till, in the seventh century of the 
Christian Era, its conquest from the Roman Empire by the Primitive 
Muslim Arabs resulted in its inclusion, without any interval of inde¬ 
pendence, in a Caliphate which was a revival of the Achaemenian 
Empire. Upon the breakdown of the 'Abbasid imperial regime in the 
tenth century of the Christian Era, Syria became once more a bone of 
contention between successor-states. The harpies in this chapter of 
Syrian history were the Katama Berbers (masquerading as a ‘Fatimid’ 
Caliphate), the East Roman Empire, the Western Christian Crusaders, 
and an Ayyubid Power whose Cairene Mamluk successors succeeded, 
before the close of the thirteenth century, in reuniting the whole of 
Syria under their rule—to remain under it throughout the fourteenth 
and fifteenth centuries, until, in the sixteenth century, the Cairene 
Mamluks’ dominions were swallowed up, entire, in the vaster empire 
of the 'Osmanlis. The Ottoman regime in Syria lasted for four hundred 
years ( a . d . 1516-1918) —till the break-up of the Ottoman Empire’s 
Asiatic dominions as a result of the General War of a . d . 1914-18. 

This summary recapitulation of Syria’s political history brings out the 
fact that, over a span of four thousand years—from the twenty-first 
century b . c . to the twentieth century of the Christian Era—the usual 
political fate of Syria had been to find herself included in the dominions 
of some universal state. Even when one of these oecumenical empires 
embracing Syria had broken up, Syria’s destiny, as often as not, had 
been immediately to be annexed entire to some other empire of the kind 
—as she was taken over from the Neo-Babylonian Empire by the 
Achaemenian Empire, from the Roman Empire by the Arab Caliphate, 
and from the Egyptian Mamluk Power by the Ottoman Empire. Even 
at times when Syria had not been included as a whole within the frontiers 
of some single empire, her most frequent alternative fate had been to be 
partitioned between two empires embracing other regions besides their 
portions of Syrian territory. In the course of the last four thousand 
years, reckoning back from the twentieth century of the Christian Era, 
Syria had been partitioned in this way between an Egyptiac ‘Middle 
Empire’ and a Sumeric ‘Empire of the Four Quarters’; between an 
Egyptiac ‘New Empire’ and a Hittite Power with its political centre of 
gravity in East Central Anatolia; between an African Ptolemaic and an 
Asiatic Seleucid successor-state of the Achaemenian Empire; and be¬ 
tween an African ‘Fatimid’ Caliphate and an Anatolian East Roman 
Empire. 

The intervals during which Syria had been under the sovereignty of 



94 AN EXPANSION OF THE FIELD OF STUDY 

local Syrian states had been few and far between; indeed, there were no 
more than four historical instances of this political dispensation: during 
an interregnum between the evaporation of ‘the New Empire’ of Egypt 
in the twelfth century b.c. and the final onset of Assyria in the eighth 
century; 1 during the shorter period of relief from external pressure 
between the collapse of the Seleucid Power in the second century' B.c. and 
the Romans’ entry into the Seleucids’ heritage in the last century B.c. ; 2 
during the bout of anarchy which intervened between the collapse of 
the ‘Fatimid’ and East Roman Powers in the eleventh century of the 
Christian Era and the establishment of the Cairene Mamluk Power in the 
thirteenth century; and since the liquidation of the Ottoman Empire in 
South-West Asia in and after the General War of a.d. 1914-18. During 
each of these exceptional periods, Syria had been in the hands of a 
number of parochial sovereign states; yet, though these local principali¬ 
ties had been governed from Syrian capitals, their rulers had, for the 
most part, been recent arrivals from abroad—Philistines, Greeks, 
Crusaders, or Zionists from the European shores of the Mediterranean; 
Hebrews or Arabs from the North Arabian Steppe; and Kurds from the 
Zagros—and, under the rule of these intrusive muluk-at-tau&’if the 
political and cultural atmosphere in Syria had still been redolent of an 
oecumenical regime that had been the Syrians’ normal experience in 
most of the chapters in their history. 

The degree to which Syria’s political history had been dominated by 
her geographical location at a meeting-point of natural thoroughfares 
was the more impressive, considering that Syria’s physical structure was 
inimical to the imperialism to which Syria had usually been subject, 
while it was favourable to the Kleinstaaterei in which she had so seldom 
been free to indulge. Syria was not only bounded by ‘natural frontiers’ 
that demarcated her vis-a-vis the regions round about; she was also 
articulated internally, like Greece, into a multitude of small physically 
self-contained ‘pockets’ and ‘perches’, and a number of the ‘perches’— 
for instance, the Jabal 'Amil, the Lebanon, the Jabal Ansarlyah, the 
Jabal HawrSn and Mount Gerizim—had served as fastnesses for 
fossilized politico-religious communities: 3 Imam! Shi'Is, Maronite 
Monotheletcs, 'All-worshipping Nusayris, Hakim-worshipping Druses, 
and dissidentlyYahweh-worshipping Samaritans. If Syria’s geographical 
location had insulated her from the outer world, as Nature had insulated 
New Guinea, instead of exposing her, like the Oxus-Jaxartcs Basin, to 
the play of external influences and pressures from all quarters of the 
compass, her physiography, with its strongly pronounced internal 
articulation within clearly defined ‘natural frontiers’, would have im¬ 
posed on her, as her normal regime, a political decentralization which the 
political effects of her location had precluded on all but four occasions 
in her history during the last four thousand years. 

This Syrian pattern of political history recurs in the Oxus-Jaxartes 
Basin. Whether it was the Median or the Persian successor-state of the 

1 See IV. iv. 473 , n. 3. 

1 Tacitus’s remark on this point has been quoted in V. v. 390, n. 3. 

1 Sec I. i. 362; II. ii. 55-57; and V. v. 1x8 and 125, n. 1. 



BIRTHPLACES OF RELIGIONS 95 

Assyrian Empire that salvaged this borderland from a Scythian Nomad 
domination in the sixth century b.c., 1 the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin comes 
into the full light of history as part of the oecumenical empire of the 
Achaemenidae, 1 and it failed in an attempt to assert its independence 
when the Achaemenian regime was overthrown by Alexander the Great. 
A prowess acquired in holding the north-east frontier of the Syriac 
World against the Eurasian Nomads did not avail the Bactrian and 
Sogdian border barons in their gallant struggle against the Macedonian 
invader. After two campaigns they found themselves compelled to 
capitulate on terms; 3 and, after Alexander’s death, their country passed 
into the hands of the Achacmenids’ Seleucid successors. The political 
independence for which the native Iranian population had fought in 
330-328 b.c. was attained by the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin only some ninety 
years later, and, even then, it was not won by native hands and was not 
long-lived. 

In the third quarter of the third century B.c. the Greek garrisons in 
the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin—finding themselves cut off from the main 
body of the Seleucid Empire by the intrusion of the Nomad Parni from 
the Transcaspian Steppe into Parthia, on the north-eastern edge of the 
Iranian Plateau astride the Great North-East Road from Babylonia*— 
erected a Seleucid province into an independent local Greek principality 
of their own; 3 but, after two generations, these local Greek princes of 
Bactria deliberately remerged the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin in a vaster body 
politic by crossing the Hindu Kush circa 183 B.c. and annexing the 
north-western territories of the Mauryan Empire in India; 6 and, though 
the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin became a separate political entity again for a 
season when, less than half a century after the Bactrian Greeks’ conquest 
of North-Western India, their home territory on the north-west side of 
the Hindu Kush was overrun by Saka and Kushan Nomad invaders, 7 
the Kushans eventually followed the example of their Greek predecessors 
by crossing the Hindu Kush in their turn and annexing North-Western 
India to their Central Asian dominions in the course of the first century 
of the Christian Era. 8 This political reunion of the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin 
with the Indus and Ganges basins under a Kushan Raj was followed up, 
during the reign of the Kushan empire-builder Kanishka (regnabat circa 
a.d. 78-123), by the annexation of the Tarim Basin 9 —an eastward pro¬ 
longation of the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin which had been under the Sinic 
rule of the Prior Han Dynasty from 101 B.c. to a.d. 16, and had been 
reconquered by the Posterior Han between a.d. 73 and a.d. io2. 10 During 
the second century of the Christian Era the Tarim Basin seems to have 
been a debatable territory between the Kushan and the Posterior Han 
Power. 11 

As for the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin itself, it relapsed into local indepen- 

* Sec II. ii. 138. * See II. ii. 139. 

* See II. ii. 139-40. 4 For this road, see VI. vii. 200. 

> See II. ii. 143 and 371. The transition from province to principality seems to have 
been a gradual one (see Tam, W. W.: The Greeks in Bactria and India (Cambridge 
1938. University Press), pp. 72-74). 6 See I. i. 86 and II. ii. 371-a. 

7 See II. ii. i4r, n. 2, and 372, and V. v. 133, n. 1. 


96 'an expansion of the field of study 

dcncc after the decay of the Kushan Power in the third century of the 
Christian Era; but, after its Kushan masters had been submerged, at the 
turn of the fourth and fifth centuries, by an Ephthalite Ilun wave of 
Eurasian Nomad invaders, and the Ephthalites had succumbed, in the 
sixth century, to a following wave of Turks, 1 the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin 
was incorporated, once again, into a universal state through its annexa¬ 
tion, in the eighth century, to the Arab Caliphate; 2 and thereafter the 
set pattern of its political history continued to repeat itself. After passing 
through the hands of the SSmanid, Saljuq, Qara Qitay, and Kw 5 rizrni 
successors of the 'Abbasids, the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin was engulfed m the 
Mongol Empire in the thirteenth century of the Christian Era; 3 and, 
after the liberator, Timur Lenk, had been betrayed by a demonic 
militarism into a dispersal of his energies which last him his chance of 
making Transoxania the headquarters of a universal state embracing all 
the shores of the Eurasian Steppe, 4 the opportunity which Timur had 
failed to seize in the fourteenth century for Transoxania was successfully 
seized in the nineteenth century by a Muscovite Power which had pro¬ 
vided a disintegrating Russian offshoot of Orthodox Christendom with 
its universal state. 

At the time of writing, the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin formed part of the 
dominions of the Russian Empire’s successor the U.S.S.R., and the links 
of steel with which Soviet Central Asia had been bound to the Soviet 
territories on the opposite shores of the Eurasian Steppe by the con¬ 
struction of the Transcaspian, Orenburg-Tashkend, and ‘Turk-Sib’ 
railways 5 were constantly being reinforced through a progressive in¬ 
dustrialization of the Central Asian Soviet Republics on a plan designed 
to integrate them, economically as well as politically, with the rest of 
the Soviet Union. 

It will be seen that, since the sixth century b.c., the Oxus-Jaxartes 
Basin had been included successively in four full-blown universal states 
—the Achaemenian Empire, the Arab Caliphate, the Mongol Empire, 
and the Russian Empire—and in three other empires—the Selcucid, the 
Bactrian Greek, and the Kushan—which had performed the social and 
cultural functions of universal states, even if they did not qualify techni¬ 
cally for being given the title. The adjoining Tarim Basin, which pro¬ 
longed the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin towards the east, had been included 
successively in three universal states—the Han Empire, the Mongol 
Empire, and the Manchu Empire—as well as in the Kushan dominions. 
Syria had been included in no less than eight universal states—the 
Sumeric ‘Empire of the Four Quarters’, ‘the Middle Empire’ and ‘the 
New Empire’ of Egypt, the Neo-Babylonian Empire, the Achaemenian 
Empire, the Roman Empire, the Arab Caliphate, and the Ottoman 
Empire—without counting in the Hyksos, Hittite, Assyrian, Seleucid, 
‘Fatimid’, East Roman, and Mamluk episodes in Syrian political history. 
This political record was so much evidence of encounters between a 

> See II. ii. 141, n. 2. 

2 See II. ii. 141 and 375-84- 1 See II. ii. 142. 

* See II. ii. 146-S and IV. iv. 491-501. . 

i The first two of these three railways had been built before the Revolution of a.d. 
, 9 , 7 - 


BIRTHPLACES OF RELIGIONS 97 

number of different civilizations on Syrian and Central Asian ground; 
and this exceptionally active intercourse between civilizations in these 
two areas explains the extraordinary concentration, within their limits, 
of birthplaces of higher religions. 


(Ill) A CLASSIFICATION OF TYPES OF 
CONTACT BETWEEN CIVILIZATIONS 

On the strength of this testimony from the histories of Syria and the 
Oxus-Jaxartes Basin we may venture to propound a ‘law’ to the effect 
that, for a study of higher religions, the minimum intelligible field must 
be larger than the domain of any single civilization, since it must be a 
field in which two or more civilizations have encountered one another. 
Our next step will be to take a wider survey of those encounters that, in 
certain historic instances, have had the effect of bringing higher religions 
to birth; but, before embarking on this survey, we must define more 
closely the type of encounter with which we are immediately concerned. 

The encounters here in question are contacts in the Space-dimension 
between civilizations which, ex hypothesi, must be contemporaries in 
order to be able to meet one another face to face at some particular 
place on the Earth’s surface; but this contact in the Space-dimension 
between contemporaries is not the only form of contact between different 
civilizations that has come to our notice in this Study. We have also come 
across contacts in the medium, not of Space, but of Time. 

One kind of contact between civilizations in the Time-dimension is 
the relation between two civilizations of different generations which we 
have labelled ‘Apparentation-and-Affiliation’. 1 In this relation the two 
parties overlap with one another in the Time-dimension, as contem¬ 
porary civilizations overlap with one another in the Space-dimension 
when they meet on common geographical ground. After the body social 
of a disintegrating civilization has split up into a dominant minority and 
a proletariat, the embryo of a new civilization may be germinating in the 
womb of the Internal Proletariat while the Dominant Minority is still 
fighting a stubborn losing battle to keep the old civilization alive; and 
in this way two civilizations that are not of the same generation will 
overlap in Time—as contemporary civilizations with mutually exclusive 
geographical habitats will overlap in Space when part of the domain of 
one of them is annexed, whether by conquest or by peaceful penetration, 
to the domain of another. 

The relation of Apparentation-and-Affiliation is by definition, as will 
be evident, a relation in the Time-dimension which can only arise 
when each of the parties is in one particular phase of its history: the 
phase of disintegration in the apparented society’s case and, in the 
affiliated society’s, the phase of pre-natal gestation. In other words, this 
is a relation between two civilizations which, at the time when they are 
establishing it, are as remote from one another in terms of their respec¬ 
tive current stages of existence as any two civilizations can ever be. 

1 See I. i. 44. 


B 2SS8.vm 



93 AN EXPANSION OF THE FIELD OF STUDY 

There is, however, another kind of contact in the Time-dimension that 
an affiliated civilization can make, in after life, with a by now extinct 
civilization to which the living civilization is already related in virtue of 
an original contact made when the still living civilization was in embryo 
and the now dead civilization was in extremis. This original contact in the 
form of Apparcntation-and-Affiliation will have started the younger 
civilization in life with a stock of practices and ideas derived from the 
older civilization’s cultural heritage; and, on the strength of the memories 
of the older civilization which have thus become embedded in the 
younger civilization’s own cultural tradition, the younger civilization 
can evoke its elder’s ghost after the younger civilization has come to 
birth and the elder has passed out of existence. 

Such an encounter between a living civilization and the ghost of a dead 
predecessor is manifestly different in kind from the previous relation 
between the same living civilization when it was in the embryo stage 
and the same predecessor when it was still alive, though moribund. The 
difference may be compared with that between an adult Hamlet’s en¬ 
counter with his father’s ghost and an infant Hamlet’s relation with the 
same father in the flesh. The relation between the child and his living 
father has more life in it than the relation between the grown man and 
his dead father’s apparition; for in the earlier relation both parties are 
alive and there is therefore a reciprocal action of each on the other, 
whereas, in the encounter between man and ghost, the man alone is 
capable of being affected by the experience, since the apparition with 
which an adult Hamlet holds converse is not in truth another living 
personality, but is a ‘projection’ or ‘objectivization’ of feelings and 
ideas, latent in Hamlet's own psyche, that have been recalled by his 
own memory and clothed with life by his own imagination. Hamlet 
conversing with the ghost is like a ventriloquist in colloquy with his 
lay figure; a single party is actually playing simultaneously both the 
parts in what purports to be a dialogue between two actors. Yet, though 
in this sense the ‘renaissance’ of an extinct culture in the life of a living 
civilization is no more than the simulation of a genuine encounter 
between one living civilization and another, there is also a sense in 
which it can be a more intimate communion than the relation of 
Apparentation-and-Affiliation between one civilization that is already 
senile, though still alive, and another that, though already alive, is still 
in embryo. 

In the relation of Apparentation-and-Affiliation the extent of the 
difference in age between the two living parties severely limits their 
capacity for appreciating one another’s point of view and profiting by 
one another’s experience. There are many treasures of experience in a 
moribund civilization’s storehouse which an embryonic civilization finds 
valueless, because it finds them incomprehensible; but, if the prestige 
of the elder civilization in the younger civilization’s eyes avails to induce 
the younger to take up into its own tradition this apparently useless 
lumber from its elder’s cultural heritage, this act of blind faith may 
eventually earn its reward. ‘When I was a child, I spake as a child, I 
understood as a child, I thought as a child; but, when I became a man, 



TYPES OF CONTACT OF CIVILIZATIONS 99 

I put away childish things.’ 1 When the younger civilization has come of 
age in its turn, it will have become capable of understanding, by analogy 
from adult experience of its own, the adult experience of its now dead 
predecessor which was incomprehensible to it in a previous chapter of 
its history in which the elder civilization was still alive, but the younger 
was not yet grown to man’s estate. Though, no doubt, an experience of 
life can be imparted more vividly to a receptive recipient through living 
contact in the flesh with the subject of that experience than through a 
recollection derived at second hand from the subject’s literary remains 
at a date when their author is dead, the receptivity of the recipient is a 
condition sine qua non for the success of any experiment in the trans¬ 
mission of cultural treasure; and a recipient who has grown to be 
receptive will be capable of deriving more cultural benefit from a 
‘renaissance’ of the culture of a predecessor who is long since dead than 
the same recipient will have found himself able to derive, in his own 
uncomprehending infancy, from his elder when he was still present in 
the flesh. 2 

A point thus put in general terms is perhaps easier to apprehend in a 
concrete illustration taken from the history of the Western Civilization’s 
relations with Hellenism. In Western cultural history the generations 
that had understood Hellenism best, and had made the most of it for the 
benefit of their own Western Society, had not been those that had been 
contemporary with Hellenism in the last days of its life; they had been 
the later generations that had cast their eyes back to a long since dead 
Hellenic World across a span of time which the West had turned to 
account for accumulating an experience of its own, akin to the stored-up 
experience of its Hellenic predecessor. The possession of this adult 
yardstick had enabled an Erasmus to appreciate and appropriate the 
treasures of a Classical Greek and Latin literature that had been virtually 
a closed book to a Gregory of Tours—though the Western Christian 
chronicler had been the contemporary of a Latin poet Venantius 
Fortunatus who had been linked by a continuous chain of poetic tradition 
with the Virgilian Age. In the strength of the same ripe Western experi¬ 
ence a Gibbon was able to savour the Hellenic culture of the Antoninc 
Age with a surer taste and a keener zest than a Gregory the Great; 3 
though, in the generation in which this Pope had been nursing an infant 
Western Civilization through its first convulsions, 4 the City of Rome 
had still been living under the sovereignty of the same Roman Imperial 
Government that had once been directed by the enlightened mind of a 

« 1 Cor. xiii. it. 1 Sec further X. ix. 124-30. 

* 'Je nc d^teste pa* de glnlraliscr la notion de moderne ct dc donner cc nom & 
certain mode d’exiatencc, au lieu d’en fairc un pur synonyme dc conlemporain. 11 y a 
dans l'histoirc dcs moments ct dc* lieux oil nous pourrion* nous introduce, now 
modernts, sans troublcr cxcessivement l’harmonie de ces tcmps- 14 , et sans y paraitre 
dcs objets infiniment curieux, inhniment visibles, dcs itres choquants, dissonants, 
inassimilables. Oil notre entree ferait le moins dc sensation, lii nous jommes presque 
chez nous. I! est ciair que !a Rome de Trajan et que rAlexandrie dcs Ptolom^cs nous 
absorberaient plus facilcment que bien dcs localitds moins rcculdcs dans le temps, mais 
plus gplcialisces dans un seul type de maurs et entiirement consacrees a une aeule rice, 
a une scule culture et a un acul systime de vie’ (Valiry, Paul: ‘La Criac dc rEsorit’, in 
Variiti (Paris 1924, Gallimard, Editions de la Nouvelle Revue Franjaise), pp. 18-19). 

« See III. iii. 267-9. 



ioo AN EXPANSION OF THE FIELD OF STUDY 
Hadrian, a Pius, and a Marcus. For the same reason the fathers of the 
American and French revolutions were able to draw on political experi¬ 
ences of Republican Rome, of the Lycian and Achaean confederacies, 
and of Pcriclcan Athens, which had remained beyond the political 
horizon of a Dante or a Rienzi. 1 

The children of a growing Western Civilization had, in fact, met with 
the experience that awaits travellers setting out south-westwards from 
the spot where Caesarea Mazaca nestles at the foot of Mount Argaeus. 
In the early stages of their journey the wayfarers are still too close to the 
foothills, and too low down in the plain, to be able to see the mighty 
peak; and, in their eyes at this stage, the soaring volcano is fallaciously 
represented by the last and lowest waves of its petrified lava-flow. It is 
not till the caravan has made its passage of the salt-flats and has begun 
to climb the flank of the South Cappadocian Plateau that Argaeus begins 
to reveal his stature, in its majesty, to the travellers’ view. From that 
vantage point they see him, across the intervening hollows, in better 


1 This widening of a Western mental horizon in one direction had, of course, to be 
paid for by its contraction in another. The Early Modem Western Humanists' aesthetic 
appreciation of the Hellenic literature of the Peridean Age made them aliens in the 
intellectual realm of the Late Medieval Western Schoolmen in which their fathers had 
been freemen bom. The Late Modem Western rationalist orientation of Gibbon’s and 
Bury’s intellects inhibited their imaginations from entering into the feelings of souls 
bom into a post-Hellenic interregnum and an Early Medieval Western ‘Dark Age’ 
which these eminent Late Modem Western historians had, perhaps perversely, made it 
their life-work to Study and interpret. 

This eclipse of insight by rationalism is manifest in Bury’s dogmatic rejection of a 
contemporary account of the way in which the Emperor Hcraclius spent his time on 
the eve of a bold and perilous enterprise that was going to decide, not merely the 
Emperor’s fate, but the fates of the Empire and the Church as well. 

‘The winter before his departure fon his daring counter-offensive campaign of a.d. 
622] was spent by Hcraclius in retirement. He was probably engaged in studying strategy 
and geography and planning his first campaign. Those who look upon him as an inspired 
enthusiast would like to see in this retirement the imperative need of communion with his 
own soul and with God; they suppose that he was like John the Baptist, or that, like Jesus, 
he retired to a mountain to pray. To support this idea they can appeal to George of 
Pisidia, who, speaking of this retreat, says that the Emperor ‘‘imitated Elias of old", 
and uses many other expressions which may be interpreted in a similar manner. It is 
probable that Hcraclius was fain to possess his soul in silence for a few months; but it 
is hazardous to press the theological word-painting of a poetical ecclesiastic into the 
service of the theory that Heraclius was a semi-prophetic enthusiast with a naturally 
weak will. When George of Pisidia mentions in another place ( Hetacliad , Book II, II. 
120 and 136 seaq.) that the Emperor studied treatises on tactics and rehearsed plans of 
battle, we feel that we are on surer ground. The Strategikon of [the Emperor] Maurice, 
doubtless, was constantly in his hands’ (Bury, I. B.: A History 0/ the Later Roman 
Empire (London 1889, Macmillan), 2 vols., vol. ii, pp. 224-j). 

In this passage the Late Modem historian-rationalist lays himself open to the censure 
of a post-Modem historian-philosopher. 

'Historical inquiry reveals to the historian the powers of his own mind. Since all he 
can know historically is thoughts that he can re-think for himself, the fact of his coming 
to know them shows him that his mind is able (or, by the very effort of studying them, 
has become able) to think in these ways. And conversely, whenever he finds certain 
historical matters unintelligible, he has discovered a limitation of his own mind; he has 
discovered that there arc certain ways in which he is not, or no longer, or not yet, able 
to think. Certain historians, sometimes whole generations of historians, find in certain 
periods of history nothing intelligible, and call them 'dark ages’; but such phrases tell 
us nothing about those ages themselves, though they tell us a great deal about the per¬ 
sons who use them, namely that they arc unable to re-think the thoughts which were 
fundamental to their life, it has been said that die Weltgeschichle ist das Weltgerieht; 
and it is true, but in a sense not always recognized. It is the historian himself who stands 
at the bar of judgement, and there reveals his own mind in its strength and weakness, 
its virtues and its vices’ (Collingwood, R. G.: The Idea of History (Oxford 1946, Claren¬ 
don Press), pp. 218-19). 



TYPES OF CONTACT OF CIVILIZATIONS :ox 
perspective than was possible for them at the earlier stage in their 
journey when their road was actually traversing the mountains’ spurs 
and when the peak was therefore towering sheer above them—so close 
that it was still invisible. 

There is thus a clear distinction to be drawn between the relation of 
‘Apparentation-and-Affiliation’ and another form of contact in the 
Time-dimension between an adult living civilization and a dead 
civilization whose cultural legacy the living civilization appropriates for 
its own use and profit by the creative act of recollection that is known as 
a ‘renaissance’. The phenomenon of ‘Apparentation-and-Affiliation’ has 
been sufficiently examined already in our study of the disintegrations of 
civilizations and of the resulting universal states, universal churches, 
and heroic ages. 1 The phenomenon of a ‘renaissance’, in which an 
affiliated civilization evokes its predecessor’s ‘ghost’, requires further 
consideration, as it has been noticed here only incidentally so far. 
Accordingly our study, in the present Part, of encounters between con¬ 
temporaries will be followed in the next Part by a study of contacts in 
the Time-dimension in the particular form of 'renaissances’. 

Before we proceed with our present inquiry into encounters between 
contemporaries in the Space-dimension, we have, however, still to 
elucidate one point and to take note of another. 

The point to be elucidated is the relation of Archaism—one of the 
symptoms of the malady of schism in the Soul which we have examined 
in a previous Part of this Study 1 —to Apparentation-and-Affiliation on 
the one hand and to renaissances on the other. In terms of renaissances, 
Archaism might perhaps be described as being a kind of renaissance in 
which the commerce between the living and the dead is transacted, not 
between two different civilizations representing two different genera¬ 
tions of their species of society, but between two different phases in the 
history of one and the same civilization. 3 While Archaism thus has in 
common with renaissances the feature of being the evocation of a ghost, 
it differs from renaissances and resembles Apparentation-and-Affiliation 
in being a relation between parties whose respective experiences and 
outlooks are, not similar, but diverse. 

The other point that we have to consider before proceeding with the 
inquiry that is the subject of the present Part of this Study is a com¬ 
pound form of contact in which an encounter between two contempor¬ 
aries that arc, both of them, affiliated to the same dead predecessor 
leads to a renaissance, in the life of one of these two living civilizations, 
of an element in the dead civilization’s cultural legacy which has been 
preserved ‘in cold storage’ in the tradition of the other living civilization 
and has been imparted by this ‘carrier’ to her contemporary' and sister 

* See V-VIII of the present Study, patrim. 1 In V. vi. 49-97. 

1 In this aspect in which it appears to be a kind of renaissance. Archaism is the 
counterpart, in the field of relations in the Time-dimension, of those encounters between 
a 'fossil and the body social that has precipitated it, or between a creative minority 
and an uncreative rank-and-file, which, in the field of relations in the Space-dimension, 
may be described as being a kind of encounter between contemporaries in which the 
parties are representatives, not of two different contemporary civilizations, but of two 
different contemporary elements in the body social of one and the same society (see 
pp. 109-10, below). 



xo2 AN EXPANSION OF THE FIELD OF STUDY 
through their contact with one another in the Space-dimension. A 
classical example of this rather complicated concatenation of contacts in 
divers dimensions is the part played in the ‘renaissance’ of the Hellenic 
culture in the life of the Western Civilization in its Modern Age by the 
Western Civilization’s contact with the main body of the sister civiliza¬ 
tion of Orthodox Christendom. 

The importance of the Byzantine contribution to this Western 
achievement must not, it is true, be over-estimated; for the West’s own 
native tradition was fraught, like the Byzantine tradition, with the 
cultural heritage of a Hellenism which was the common cultural back- 

K und of both these affiliated civilizations; and, no doubt, the Western 
:iety, as it came to maturity, would have conjured a renaissance of 
Hellenism out of its own tradition in any event, even if it had never come 
into contact with its Byzantine sister. A Western renaissance of Hellen¬ 
ism from the native Western tradition was in fact already taking place 
on Western ground in Northern and Central Italy 1 —the precocious 
nursery-garden of the Western Civilization in its modern phase*— 
before the medieval encounter between the Western and Byzantine 
worlds took the cultural form of conveying a knowledge of the Classical 
Greek language, and the texts of works of Hellenic literature written in 
Greek, to Italy from Constantinople. This conveyance of intellectual 
treasure did not, indeed, take place till the fifteenth century of the 
Christian Era, when the encounter between the two sister civilizations 
was already four hundred years old and had produced such a bitter 
estrangement that the Byzantine peoples were by then already acquies¬ 
cing in an Ottoman domination over the main body of Orthodox Christen¬ 
dom as a less unpleasant fate than the Western domination which was the 
practical alternative then confronting all Orthodox Christians except the 
Russians. Thus the fifteenth-century intellectual commerce between 
Constantinople and Italy did not originate the Western renaissance of 
Hellenism. Yet, though it did not originate it, it did enrich it—and this 
to an extent that greatly heightened its potency. 

The sample of the Hellenic cultural heritage that had been carried in 
the native Western tradition was merely the jejune secondhand version 
of it in the Latin language; and, if the West had been able to draw only 
on these Grcckless cultural resources of its own, the Western renaissance 
of Hellenism would have been a revocation of the Magnus Annus without 
its quickening spring. The Western scholar-necromancers who were 

5 As has been pointed out in IV. iv. 27s, n. 2, it was no accident that this native West¬ 
ern renaissance of Hellenism occurred in a province of the Medieval Western Christian 
World that had previously forged ahead of the main body of Western Christendom by 
making successful responses to local challenges. 

* Sec I. i. 19. The cultural revolution in Transalpine Europe at the turn of the fifteenth 
and sixteenth centuries of the Christian Era, which had come to be called ‘the Renais¬ 
sance’, had been, in reality, not an evocation of a ghost of the dead Hellenic culture, but 
a reception of a contemporary variation of the Western culture that had arisen in 
Northern Ttaly and that had by that time forged so far ahead of the contemporary 
Transalpine version of the same Western culture as to have become virtually a distinct 
civilization. This sixtccnth-ccntury reception of a contemporary Italian culture in the 
Transalpine provinces of the Western World had acquired its misnomer ‘renaissance’ 
because the Italian culture which was received at this time beyond the Alps had recently 
enriched itself through a local Italian renaissance of Hellenism—first in its Latin dress 
and thereafter in its original Greek embodiment (see IV. iv. 275, n. 1). 



TYPES OF CONTACT OF CIVILIZATIONS 103 
striving to evoke a ghost of Hellenism to inspire a Modern Western way 
of life would hardly have produced the profound effect that they did 
produce on Western history if the dingy changeling Latin dress in which 
Hellenism had re-emerged from a Western store-cupboard had not been 
supplemented by the authentic original garments of a dazzling Greek 
texture which the West acquired from Byzantium at the eleventh hour. 
The passive service which Byzantium thus performed for the West as 
the ‘carrier’ of a treasure which the West did not merely take over but 
succeeded in turning to profitable account had been estimated in the 
following terms by a Modern Western humanist man of letters: 

'The Byzantines had grave limitations for the work of traditio. But they 
had the wisdom and the humility to see what their duty was, and the 
constancy of mind to do it. They did preserve the old literature, though 
they could not understand its value. They believed it was beautiful even 
if they could not see the beauty. They believed it was full of wisdom and 
virtue and the search for truth and for some forgotten thing called free¬ 
dom. And, though they understood neither the drama, nor the poetry, 
nor the philosophy, nor even the history, they did at least copy letter by 
letter the great books, which were destined, when they met with readers 
capable of comprehending them, to bring about the rebirth of Civilization.’* 

If the Byzantine Greek scholars could have risen from the dead to read 
thi6 Western judgement on their work, no doubt they would have been 
both surprised and incensed at finding themselves commended as con¬ 
scientious players of the part of a servant who, in the Parable of the 
Talents, 1 is denounced by his master as ‘slothful’ and ‘wicked’. They 
would have pointed out that, even if the five talents originally entrusted 
to them to invest did eventually pass into the hands of an acquisitive 
Western fellow servant of theirs who had received a beggarly single 
talent as his own original allocation, the implication that they had 
allowed those five talents to lie idle while they were in their keeping was 
refuted by patent historical facts. How could the Byzantines be accused 
of having laid up their legacy from Hellenism in a napkin or of having 
hidden it in the earth, when the renaissances which they had actually 
conjured out of it were commemorated by such eloquent monuments? 
Did not the Byzantine ivory-carving of the eleventh and twelfth centur¬ 
ies of the Christian Era bear witness to a renaissance, at least in minia¬ 
ture, of an Hellenic art of sculpture in bas-relief? Was not the legislation 
of the Macedonian Dynasty inspired by a Justinianean Hellenic Corpus 
Iuris} And was not the establishment of the East Roman Empire by 
Leo Syrus the revival of a Constantinian Hellenic universal state ? In the 
light of these artistic, juristic, and political Byzantine achievements, 3 
was it fair to convict the Byzantines, on an exclusively literary test, of 
having failed to bring about a rebirth of Civilization ? 

But, even (our Byzantine apologists might have gone on to protest) 
if this Western indictment could have been proved against them, a 
culpable omission, on their own part, to turn the talents entrusted to 

' Murray, Gilbert: Greek Studies (Oxford 1946, University Pros), pp. 104-5. 

a Matt. xxv. 14-30; Lukexix. 12-26. . 

J A critique, from a Western standpoint, of these renaissances of Hellenism in 
Orthodox Christendom will be found in IV. iv. 363, n. 1. 



io 4 AN EXPANSION OF THE FIELD OF STUDY 
them to due account would not have automatically pilloried them in the 
role of serving as ‘carriers’ of these talents for eventual transfer to their 
Western neighbours. To have existed for the benefit of the West was not 
(the Byzantines would insist) the Orthodox Christian Civilization’s 
raison d'itre . 1 To minister to the West’s convenience was not an object 
that any good Byzantines had ever intended to work for; and, if it should 
turn out that Fate had played them the malicious trick of having set 
them to work for the West inadvertently, either by transmitting to the 
West the Byzantine legacy of Hellenism or by shielding the West against 
direct assaults on the Arab Caliphate’s part from the Caliphate’s South- 
West Asian base of operations, 2 this would be, for them, a cause of more 
acute chagrin than any other incident in their tragic history. 

To such Byzantine protests, however, a Westerner could make a 
maliciously telling retort by demurely putting on record his sincere 
testimonial to the benefits which the West had in fact received from the 
main body of Orthodox Christendom both as a military shield against 
the Arab Caliphate and as a cultural ‘carrier’ of Hellenism; and he could 
point out both that, in the appraisal of benefits, the beneficiary neces¬ 
sarily has the last word, and that the West's own estimate of the benefits 
that she had received from Byzantium would not be invalidated by a 
Byzantine affidavit that the benefaction had been inadvertent or even 
contrary to intent. It was a plain matter of historical fact that a 
Western World which had been endeavouring to profit by the single 
talent of Hellenic treasure that had been its own meagre trust fund had 
been suddenly and enormously enriched in the fifteenth century by a 
delivery from Byzantine into Western hands of the five talents that had 
been the original portion of the more generously endowed sister society. 
It was also (the Westerner would add) a matter of historical fact that 
the transfer had been justified in the event by the cultural productivity 
which the West had achieved after its cultural working capital had been 
thus augmented by this transfer of an unexpended balance in the 
Orthodox Christian Society’s cultural deposit account. 

Whatever the final verdict might be on this cultural controversy 
between Byzantium and the West, it was manifest that the episode out of 
which it had arisen had been a concatenation of contacts between three 
civilizations in two dimensions. An historical plot of this complicated 

S ttern is not likely to present itself frequently, yet the particular per- 
mance on which our attention has been fixed up to this point was not 
the only one known to History. The role of serving as a cultural ‘carrier’, 
which Byzantium had performed for the West in transmitting to her the 
legacy of Hellenism in its original Greek embodiment, had likewise 
been performed—through the transmission of comparable cultural 
treasures—by the Arabic Muslim Civilization for the Ottoman province 
of an Iranic Muslim World, and by the main body of the Far Eastern 
Society for an offshoot of the Far Eastern Civilization in Japan. 

When, in the course of the sixteenth century of the Christian Era, 

. 1 For this naively egocentric conventional Western view of the East Roman Empire’s 
historical role, see I. i. 156, with n. 1. 

J See I. i. 156, with n. 1, and II. ii. 367-8. 



TYPES OF CONTACT OF CIVILIZATIONS 105 

almost the whole of the Arabic World, with the one notable exception of 
Morocco, was progressively annexed by the 'Osmanlis, 1 the cultural 
effect was to transmit to the Ottoman province of the Iranic World, in 
the original classical Arabic form, 2 a legacy from a common Syriac past 
which this Iranic sister civilization had inherited in a Persian dress in 
its own native tradition. 3 It will be seen that this concatenation of cultural 
contacts between the Iranic Muslim, Arabic Muslim, and Syriac civiliza¬ 
tions is formally parallel to the contemporary interplay between the 
Western Christian, Orthodox Christian, and Hellenic civilizations, 
though these two outwardly similar cultural episodes not only took 
place in quite different political circumstances, but also produced sub¬ 
stantially different cultural effects, owing to a difference in relative 
degree of vitality between cultural treasures that were transmitted 
respectively by the Egyptians to the 'Osmanlis and by the Byzantines 
to the Italians. 4 The cultural treasure that the ‘Osmanlis received via 
Cairo from a dead Syriac culture’s Islamic last phase consisted mainly of 
desiccated classical Islamic theology; and a corresponding legacy of 
desiccated classical Confucian philosophy, from the treasure-house of a 
dead Sinic Society, was all the Sinic treasure that was obtained in the 
Tokugawa Age by a Japanese offshoot of the affiliated Far Eastern 
Civilization via the main body of the same Far Eastern Civilization in 
contemporary China. 

These three episodes are examples of a compound type of contact 
between civilizations which may be distinguished, as such, from other 
kinds; but we shall find it more convenient to deal with these episodes 
analytically, under the two heads of ‘encounters between contemporaries’ 
and ‘renaissances’, than to reserve them for separate study; and we may 
now embark on our survey of ‘encounters between contemporaries’ with¬ 
out further preliminaries. 

< See I. i. 348. Syria was conquered by the Ottoman Empire in a.d. 1516, and Egypt 
(carrying with it the HijSz) in A.D. 1517- Algeria was acquired in a.d. 1516-18 (see pp. 
220-1, below), ‘Iraq in a.d. 1534, and Tunisia (definitively) in A.D. 1574. The conquest 
of the Yaman was completed in a.d. 1570. Sec further X. a. 37-38. 

J See I. i. 395-6. 

» See I. i. 71. 

« See I. i. 396. 


B 289S.nii 


E2 



B. A SURVEY OF ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN 
CONTEMPORARY CIVILIZATIONS 

(I) A PLAN OF OPERATIONS 

I N selling out to make a survey of encounters between contemporary 
civilizations, we are confronted, as we were in attempting our original 
survey of the societies between whom these encounters take place, 1 with 
a formidably intricate maze of history; and now, as then, we shall be 
well advised to look, before plunging into the thicket, for a favourable 
point of entry. In our present enterprise this preliminary reconnaissance 
is perhaps even more necessary than we found it to be on the earlier 
occasion, since there is a considerably larger number of trees in the 
wood which we have now to explore. 

The number of civilizations that we originally located on our cultural 
map was only twenty-one; 2 and, even if the progress of archaeological 
discovery were to warrant us in regarding the Indus Culture as a separ¬ 
ate society from the Sumcric Civilization 1 and the Shang Culture as a 
civilization antecedent to the Sinic, this change in our reckoning would 
raise our total muster of civilizations only to twenty-three. 

These twenty-one or twenty-three civilizations fall into two groups— 
one originating in the Old World and the other in the New World— 
if we classify them by their birthplaces; and either of these geographical 
groups is distributed chronologically between more generations than 
one—the actual number of generations up to date being two in the New 
World and three in the Old World. In the earliest generation of the 
Old-World series there are in any case four societies—the Egyptiac, the 
Sumcric, the Minoan, and either the Sinic or else the Shang, if we 
assign the Sinic to the second generation, instead of the first, on the 
strength of the twentieth-century archaeologists’ achievement of dis¬ 
interring an antecedent Shang Culture—and the number rises to five 
if we are to regard the Indus Culture as a distinct society and not as a 
mere variety of the Sumcric Civilization. In the second generation of the 
same series there arc in any case five societies—the Hellenic, the Syriac, 
the Hittite, the Babylonic, and the Indie—and possibly six, if the Sinic 
Society is to be classified as being a civilization with a predecessor. In the 
third generation there are eight societies : 4 the Western, the main body of 
Orthodox Christendom, an offshoot of Orthodox Christendom in Russia, 
the Iranic Muslim, the Arabic Muslim, the Hindu, the main body of the 
Far Eastern Society in China, and an offshoot of the Far Eastern Society 
in Korea and Japan. In the New-World series there are two societies in 
the first generation—the Andean and the Mayan—and two in the second : 
the Yucatec and the Mexic. 

' See I. i. 51-129. . 1 See I. i. 133. 

1 Alternatively, the Indus Culture might be regarded as a mere ‘colonial’ variation 
on the Sumcric (sec I. i. 107-8). 

* A criticism of this count has been made by Prince Dmitri Obolensky (see pp. 669- 
70 and 671, below). 



A PLAN OF OPERATIONS 107 

Manifestly the possible number of geographical encounters between 
contemporary civilizations will have been restricted by the geographical 
segregation of the civilizations on our list into two groups and by the 
chronological segregation of the societies belonging to either geographi¬ 
cal group into different generations. Nevertheless, the total number of 
encounters between civilizations that have been one another’s contem¬ 
poraries is notably larger than the total number of civilizations of all 
generations in both geographical groups taken together. This at first 
sight perhaps surprising arithmetical fact is accounted for by several 
considerations. 

In the first place it is possible for contemporary civilizations to have 
more than one encounter with one another in the course of their histories, 
and this possibility had been actually fulfilled not infrequently. For 
example, the encounter between the Western, Orthodox Christian, and 
Islamic societies, which was such a prominent motif in current history at 
the time of writing, had been preceded by an encounter between the 
same three parties during the so-called 'medieval' phase of Western 
history; and this earlier encounter will prove to be a separate story 
(though we shall find, as might be expected, that the two stories have 
a connecting link). 

The number of encounters between contemporary civilizations had 
been further increased by chronological overlaps between the life-spans 
of Old-World civilizations belonging to different generations. The 
Egyptiac Civilization, for instance, was galvanized, as we have seen, by 
the successive impacts of Hyksos, 'Sea Peoples’, Assyrians, Persians, 
and Macedonians into going on living so long beyond its normal expecta¬ 
tion of life that it encountered as contemporaries, not only two civiliza¬ 
tions of its own generation—the Sumcric and the Minoan—but also 
four civilizations of the next generation: the Babylonic, Hittite, Syriac, 
and Hellenic. 

Again, the civilizations belonging to this second generation in the 
Old-World series did not all come to birth or all go into dissolution at 
exactly the same date. The Babylonic, Indie, and Hittite civilizations 
seemed to have emerged from a post-Sumeric interregnum in the 
fourteenth century b.c.; the Syriac and Hellenic civilizations emerged 
from a post-Minoan interregnum in the twelfth century b.c.; and the 
emergence of the Sinic Civilization might have to be dated as late as the 
ninth or the eighth century b.c. if it proved to have been preceded by a 
distinctively separate Shang Culture whose universal state had gone 
into dissolution in either the twelfth or the eleventh century b.c., accord¬ 
ing to our choice between two alternative traditional Sinic chronologies. 
The dates at which these six Old-World civilizations of the second 
generation went into dissolution were still farther removed from one 
another than the dates of their births. While the Hittite Civilization was 
overwhelmed as early as the twelfth millennium B.c. by the very 
Volkerwanderung that preceded the Hellenic and the Syriac Society’s 
emergence, the Babylonic Society did not go into dissolution till the 
first century of the Christian Era, the Sinic Society not till the second 
century of the same era, and the Hellenic Society not till the fourth 


io8 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
century. As for the Syriac and Indie societies, they lived on, like the 
Egyptiac, beyond their normal expectation of life, and this for the same 
reason. The course of their disintegration was interrupted by the impact 
of an alien society, and this interruption, in which the intruder was the 
Hellenic Society in both cases, prolonged the life of the Indie Society 
into the fifth century of the Christian Era and the life of the Syriac 
Society into the tenth century. 1 In consequence, the Syriac Society 
encountered as contemporaries not only one civilization of an older 
generation than its own—the Egyptiac—and other civilizations of its 
own generation—the Hellenic, Babylonic, and Indie—but also some of 
the civilizations of the succeeding generation—the Western Christian, the 
Orthodox Christian both in its main body and in its Russian offshoot, 
the Hindu, and the main body of the Far Eastern Society. 

Moreover, some of the debris of disintegrating civilizations of the 
second generation in the Old World had been preserved, as we have seen, 
in a ‘fossilized’ state. The oldest example was the fossil of the Hittite 
Civilization which had survived, after that society’s premature extinc¬ 
tion, astride the Taurus and Antitaurus mountain ranges in South- 
Eastern Anatolia and Northern Syria. These fossil remains of the 
Hittite Society were eventually absorbed into the bodies social of the 
Syriac and Hellenic societies, but other extinct civilizations had left 
fossils that were still extant at the time of writing. The Jews and Parsecs 
and the Nestorian, Monophysitc, and Monothelete Christians were 
fossils of the Syriac Civilization deposited in two strata representing two 
stages in an encounter between the Syriac Society and Hellenism in the 
course of the Syriac Society’s disintegration, while the Hinayanian 
Buddhists of Ceylon, Burma, Siam, and Cambodia and the ’lantric 
Mahayanian Buddhists of Tibet and Mongolia were similar fossils 
representing corresponding stages in the parallel history of an Indie 
Society whose disintegration had likewise been interrupted and re¬ 
tarded by an encounter with the same Hellenic intruder. 

These fossils had survived to encounter, as contemporaries, civiliza¬ 
tions that had not emerged until after the death of those civilizations by 
which the fossils themselves had been precipitated. The fossil of the 
Hittite Civilization, for instance, had lingered on to encounter the Syriac, 
Babylonic, and Hellenic civilizations; the Jewish relic of the Syriac Civili¬ 
zation had encountered the Arabic Muslim, Iranic Muslim, Orthodox 
Christian, and Western civilizations; the Parsecs had encountered the 
Hindu, Iranic Muslim, and Western civilizations; the Nestorians had 
encountered not only the same three civilizations as the Parsees, but 
the Arabic Muslim and Far Eastern civilizations and the Tantric 
Mahayanian fossil of the Indie Civilization as well; the Monophysites 
had encountered the Arabic Muslim, Orthodox Christian, Western, 
and Hindu civilizations; the Monotheletes, the Arabic Muslim, Orthodox 
Christian, and Western; the Hinayanian relics of the Indie Civilization 

« Reckoning the interregnum following the break-up of a restored Syriac universal 
state to have begun, in the domain of the Abbasid Caliphate, with the Fitimid Katama 
Berbers’ occupation of Egypt in a.d. 969, and, in the domain of the Andalusian umayyad 
Caliphate, with the break-up of the Umayyad realm into indigenous parochial successor- 
atates in the early years of the eleventh century of the Christian Era. 



A PLAN OF OPERATIONS 109 

had encountered the Hindu, Far Eastern, Western, and Arabic; the Tan- 
tric Mahayanian Buddhists had encountered the Hindu, Far Eastern, 
Western, and Iranic. 

This long list of multiple collisions and contacts does not tell the 
whole tale of encounters to which a ‘fossil’ had been one of the parties. 
In the histories of the Syriac and the Indie Civilization, for example, in 
which fossils had been deposited during the lifetime of the society in 
strata representing stages in an encounter between this society and an 
intrusive Hellenism, the divers fossil forms that the victimized society 
had assumed under the impact of an alien social force had in either case 
had subsequent encounters with a later form that the same society had 
assumed in the act of eventually ejecting the alien intruder. The Jewish 
and Parsee fossils and the Nestorian, Monophysitc, and Monothclete 
Christian fossils of the Syriac Society all encountered the Syriac Society 
itself in its last phase under the regime of an Islamic Caliphate that was 
a post-Hellenic resumption of the Achacmenian Empire. Similarly, the 
Hinayanian Buddhist and the Tantric Mahayanian Buddhist fossils of 
the Indie Society encountered the Indie Society itself in its correspond¬ 
ing last phase under the regime of a Hindu Guptan Empire that was a 
post-Hellenic resumption of the Empire of the Mauryas. 

In these two cases we see an encounter between contemporaries taking 
place within the bosom of a single society between different sub- 
societies into which this society has articulated itself, and this 'internal’ 
type of encounter is not represented solely by cases in which one of the 
parties to it is a fossil. In studying the growths of civilizations, we have 
found 1 that the regular social process through which a growing society 
advances from one stage in its growth to another is a compound move¬ 
ment in which a creative individual or minority first withdraws from 
the common life of the society, then works out, in seclusion, a solution 
for some problem with which the society as a whole is confronted, and 
finally re-enters into communion with the rest of the society in order to 
help it forward on its road by imparting to it the results of the creative 
work which the temporarily secluded individual or minority has accom¬ 
plished during the interval between withdrawal and return. Manifestly 
the impact of the returning creative individual or minority on the un- 
creative rank-and-file of the society within whose bosom the process of 
withdrawal-and-return occurs is another form of encounter between 
contemporaries in which the parties are all members of a single civiliza¬ 
tion. Cases in point, which have come to our attention already, 2 are the 
‘Ionization’ of the Hellenic Society, in the transition from a first to a 
second chapter of its growth, through the impact of a temporarily 
secluded Ionian creative minority on the rest of the Hellenic body social; 
the ‘Atticization’ of the same Hellenic Society, in the transition from the 
second to a third chapter of its growth, by the similar impact of a like¬ 
wise temporarily secluded Athenian creative minority; the ‘Italianiza- 
tion’ of the Western Society, in the transition from a second to a third 
chapter of its growth, by the impact of a temporarily secluded North 
Italian creative minority; and the ‘Anglicization’ of the same Western 
I In III. iii. 248-377- 2 !n M- “»• 33 ^- 63 - 



no ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
Society, in the transition from the third to a fourth chapter of its growth, 
by the impact of a temporarily secluded English creative minority. 

Such encounters within the bosom of a single society are authentic 
instances of the phenomenon of contact between contemporaries, 
whether the internal articulation of the society which makes this type of 
encounter possible has been produced by the withdrawal of a creative 
individual or minority or by the precipitation of a fossil. We have also 
still to take note of a further set of encounters between contemporaries 
of the more usual kind, in which the parties to the encounters are 
different civilizations and not merely different representatives of a single 
civilization. 

The last factor that had multiplied the number of geographical en¬ 
counters between different contemporary societies had been the fusion 
of the New-World with the Old-World group as a result of the conquest 
of the Ocean by the Western Christian Civilization in the ‘modern’ 
chapter of its history (currebat circa a.d. 1475-1875). The impact of this 
Old-World society on the Mexic, Yucatec, and Andean societies across 
the Atlantic had been the first notable case, if not the first known case, of 
‘inter-hemispheric’ contact. 1 

This achievement of the Modern Western Civilization is an historical 
landmark; and it may give us a clue to finding our point of entry into the 
historical maze that we have undertaken to explore. 

When, in the course of the fifteenth century of the Christian Era, 
West European mariners mastered the technique of oceanic navigation, 
they thereby won a means of physical access to all the inhabited and 
habitable lands on the face of the planet; and their conquest of the 
Ocean had in fact resulted, by the time of writing, in the establishment 
of contact between a Western Society that had originated on the North 
Atlantic seaboard of the Old World and all other living societies—not 
excluding those primitive societies that, before Western explorers tracked 
them down, had been secluded in a virtual isolation in such natural 
fastnesses as the tropical forests in the heart of Africa, Borneo, and New 
Guinea, the jungle-clad mountains in the borderland between India, 
China, and Tibet, and the uninviting extremities of Asia and South 
America: an Arctic North-Eastern Siberia and an Antarctic Tierra del 
Fucgo. 2 In the lives of all these other living societies the impact of the 
West had come to be the paramount social force and ‘the Western 
Question’ had come to be the fateful issue. As the Western pressure on 
them had increased—and, so far, it had been increasing in a geometrical 
progression of growing severity—their lives had been turned upside 
down; and it was not only the frail social fabric of the surviving primi- 

1 The possibility that, in a pre-Columbian Age, the Plains Indian* of North America 
had already borrowed the composite bow from an Old-World Eurasian Nomad Society 
is noticed on p. 638, below. 

2 These holes and comers in the Oihoument —which had afforded an asylum for a 
rearguard of primitive Mankind because their inaccessibility or unattractiveness had 
exempted them from invasion by any of the civilizations before the literally world-wide 
expansion of a Modern Western representative of this aggressive parvenue species of 
human society—had also served as preserves for religious practices and beliefs which 
might perhaps prove to be relics of a purer, as well as older, religion than the idolatry 
to which Man in Process of Civilization had succumbed before the eventual epiphany of 
the historic higher religions (sec VII. vii. 739-68). 



A PLAN OF OPERATIONS in 

tive societies that had been pulverized; the living non-Western civiliza¬ 
tions had been convulsed, and even the petrified fossils of a previous 
generation of civilizations had been corroded, by this literally world¬ 
wide revolution of Western origin. The Western Society alone had 
appeared at first to remain unaffected, in its own life, by the havoc that 
it was thus making of the rest of the World; but, within the lifetime of 
the writer of this Study, one of the encounters between the West and its 
contemporaries had come to darken the horizon of the Western Society 
itself. 

The dominating role in Western affairs that had thus come to be 
played by a collision between the West and a foreign body social was 
a novel feature in recent Western history; and the date at which this 
new situation had arisen could be established with some precision by a 
reading of the index of power politics. From the failure of the second 
Ottoman assault on Vienna in a . d . 1683 to the defeat of Germany in the 
General War of a . d . 1939-45, the West as a whole had been so over¬ 
whelmingly superior in power to the rest of the World in the aggregate 1 
that the fluctuations in a balance of power between Great Powers that 
were all either Western or Westernized in their culture had been the 
most important military, political, and economic phenomena in the 
World during that quarter of a millennium. 3 Throughout that period 
the Western Powers virtually had nobody to reckon with outside their 
own circle, and, on the material plane, the destiny of all Mankind outside 
that circle was therefore determined, in that age, by the course of the 
mutual relations between those Western Powers. This Western mono¬ 
poly of power in the World came to an end, however, when, after the 
war of a . d . 1939-45, Germany's bid for world domination, which had 
been the previous Leitmotiv in the play of power politics, gave place to 
the new Leitmotiv of a competition for the same prize between the 
United States and the Soviet Union. In itself, of course, this reversal of 
the relation between the two principal victors in a war in which their 
principal adversary had suffered a crushing defeat was an incident in the 
play of political dynamics that, so far from being unusual, might have 
been predicted as almost inevitable in the light of past precedents. A 
drastic change in the balance was always apt to be reflected in a corres¬ 
pondingly drastic change in the constellation of political forces. If, how¬ 
ever, we go beyond this rather superficial consideration of the formal 
dynamics of the Balance of Power to take account of the characters of 

> Sec III. iii. 200. 

1 In I. i. 33-34 it ha* been pointed out that, in this age, the Western Society had 
become so sure of its own predominance in the World that it had cessed to have any 
collective name of its own in its own vocabulary. The West now no longer felt a need 
to distinguish itself by a proper name from other societies which it no longer regarded 
as its equals. When all the members of all the living non-Wcstem societies were con¬ 
founded together in Western minds under the negative label ‘Natives', the correlative 
term on Western lips could only be 'civilized people*—with the implication that there 
could be no such thing as Civilization in any non-Westem way of life. This Modem 
Western identification of Civilization with Western Civilization was a secularized ver¬ 
sion of the Primitive Western Christian proposition: 'Nemini salus ... nisi in Ecclesifl' 
(Cyprianus, Th. C.: Ep. iv, chap. 4. Cp. beCatholicaeBccUtiaeUnitale. chap. 6: ‘Habere 
non potest Deum patrem qui Ecclesiam non habet matrem.'—‘ “Salus”, inquit 
[Cyprianus),"extra Ecclesiam non cst" ’—Saint Augustine: DcDaptimo contra Donatiitas, 
Book IV, chap, xvii (39)). 


Hz ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
the dramatis personae, we shall see that, in one vital point, the re- 
alinement of political forces in and after a.d. 1945 was different in kind 
from any previous alinement since the Ottoman Empire’s fall out of the 
race for world power in a.d. 1683. After 1945, for the first time since 
1683 in the histories of the West and of the World, one of the protagon¬ 
ists in power politics was once again a Power of a non-Wcstern com¬ 
plexion. 

There was, it is true, an ambiguity, that has come to our notice in 
previous contexts, 1 in the relation of both the Soviet Union and the 
Communist ideology to the Western Civilization. 

The Soviet Union was the political heir of a Petrine Russian Empire 
which had become a voluntary convert to the Western way of life at the 
turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and had participated 
thereafter in the Western game of power politics as a proselyte admitted 
on a tacit understanding that he would abide by the accepted Western 
rules. Communism, again, was in origin, like Liberalism 2 and Fascism, 
one of the secular ideologies that had arisen in the Modern West as sub¬ 
stitutes for a Christianity which the West had, in effect, discarded. And 
thus, from one point of view, the competition which, since a . d . 1945, 
had arisen between the Soviet Union and the United States for hege¬ 
mony in the World, and between Communism and Liberalism for the 
ideological allegiance of Mankind, might still be regarded as a domestic 
issue within the household of a Western Society that had opened its 
doors to admit a Russian apostate from the civilization of Orthodox 
Christendom to become an adopted member of the Western family. 

From another point of view, however, the Soviet Union could be 
looked upon, like its Petrine predecessor, as a Russian Orthodox 
Christian universal state clinging to life in a Western dress which it had 
been led to adopt, not by any positive desire to change its cultural 
allegiance, but by its very will to go on living a distinctive life of its own 
in an OikoumenS whose cultural climate had latterly become so bleakly 
Westernized that life on Earth was now no longer possible without some 
measure of adaptation to Western ways. From the same angle of vision, 
Communism could be looked upon as an ideological substitute, not for 
Western, but for Orthodox, Christianity, in ex-Orthodox Christian 
hearts that had become so far Westernized that they had ceased to find 
their ancestral religion tenable without having lost the traditional Russian 
repugnance towards accepting any faith that was held orthodox in the 
West. On this interpretation the failure of Liberalism, in the long run, to 
win the Russians’ allegiance would be accounted for by its being branded 
as a secular Modem Western Society’s orthodox ideology, 3 while the 
victory of Communism in Russia would be accounted for by its being 
signalized as a secular Modern Western creed which was a revolutionary 

* Sec III. iii. 200-2 and 563-5. 

3 Using: rhe term, not in the narrower sense in which, in the nineteenth-century party 
politics of the United KinRdom, it had stood for the opposite of'Conservatism’, but in 
the wider meaning of the Modem Western way of life which was called 'Capitalism' 
by its critics and ‘Free Enterorise’ by its advocates. 

3 From the standpoint of Christianity, of course, Liberalism, as well as Communism 
and Fascism, was a heresy. 



A PLAN OF OPERATIONS 113 

critique of the orthodox secular Modern Western way of life and was 
therefore an abominable heresy in orthodox secular Modern Western 
eyes. On this showing, Communism would be an ideally convenient and 
attractive faith for Russians whose only recourse was to fight the Modern 
West with its own weapons in a conflict between contending civilizations 
in which the Russians were still determined not to lay down their arms, 
but in which none but Modern Western weapons were any longer of 
any avail. 

At the time of writing, each of these two alternative interpretations of 
the spirit of Soviet Communism and the role of the Soviet Union 
manifestly expressed some measure of the truth, and at the same time it 
was still impossible to forecast whether the Westernizing or the anti- 
Western tendency would ultimately prevail in Russian life. Short of that, 
however, it was unquestionable that a sharp re-accentuation of the anti- 
Western tendency in Russian feeling and thought had been one conse¬ 
quence of the Russian Communist Revolution of a . d . 1917, and that, in 
view of the potency of this phobia in the Russian Communist £thos, the 
emergence of the Soviet Union from the General War of a . d . 1939-45 
as one of two rival World Powers had reintroduced a cultural conflict 
into a political arena which, for some 250 years past, had been reserved 
for domestic political quarrels between Powers that had, all alike, been 
of one Modern Western cultural complexion. 

At the time of writing, this duel on the political plane between the 
Soviet Union and the United States and on the cultural plane between 
Communism and Liberalism was beclouding the whole social horizon 
of the living generation of Mankind. Yet this concentration of the 
World’s attention and apprehension on this particular encounter be¬ 
tween two contemporary civilizations was in no sense presumptive 
evidence that the Russo-Western conflict would continue to occupy the 
whole field. In re-engaging in their struggle against Westernization 
after having apparently long since given up the battle for lost, the 
Russians were setting an example which had already been followed by 
the Chinese and which might well be followed, in time, by the Japanese, 
Hindus, and Muslims, and even by societies that had become so deeply 
dyed with a Western colour as the main body of Orthodox Christendom 
in South-Eastern Europe and the three submerged pre-Columbian 
civilizations in the New World. The reopening of the particular issue 
between the West and Russia had, in fact, incidentally reopened the 
general issue between the West and the non-Western majority of Man¬ 
kind. 

These considerations suggest that a scrutiny of the encounters be¬ 
tween the Modem West and the other living civilizations might prove a 
convenient point of departure for embarking on a survey of the whole 
field of encounters between contemporaries. The next set of encounters 
that would present itself for examination on this plan of operations would 
be the encounters of the non-Western living civilizations with one another. 
And, when we had thus completed our review of encounters between all 
civilizations still alive, the obvious next step—if our plan had justified 
itself by its results so far—would be to single out, among civilizations 


1 X 4 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
now extinct, those which, at some stage in their history, had made on 
their neighbours an impact comparable to the West’s impact on its corn- 
temporaries—even though, in these earlier cases, the action might not 
have been literally world-wide. On these lines we might find ourselves 
able to work our way into the heart of the thicket, break up the tangled 
terrain into manageable tracts, and piece together a general map of the 
landscape by surveying each tract in turn—without committing ourselves 
to examining every single encounter between contemporary civilizations 
that had found its way into our inventor)'. 1 

If we follow this plan by starting operations with the set of encounters 
to which the Modern Western Society had been a party, there is, how¬ 
ever, still one preliminary point to be settled. We have still to determine 
the date at which the ‘modern’ chapter of Western history begins. 

Non-Western observers would date its beginning from the moment 
when the first Western ships made a landfall on their coasts; for, in 
non-Westcrn eyes, Homo Occidentals, like Life itself according to one 
Modem Western scientific hypothesis, 3 was a creature of marine origin. 
Far Eastern scholars, for example, when they set eyes on their first 
specimens of Western humanity in the Age of the Ming, labelled the 
new arrivals ‘South Sea Barbarians’ on the evidence of their immediate 
geographical provenance and their apparent level of culture. In this and 
other encounters the ubiquitous Modem Western mariners went through 
a series of rapid metamorphoses in their human victims’ bewildered eyes. 
At their first landing, they looked like harmless marine animalculae of a 
previously unknown breed; soon they revealed themselves, by their 
aggressive behaviour, to be savage sea-monsters; and finally they proved 
to be predatory amphibians who, unhappily for Mankind, were as 
mobile on dry land as in their own clement. This marine epiphany of a 
Protean carnivore marks the beginning of the Modern Age of Western 
history from a non-Western point of view; and this chronological 
reckoning in the objective terms of the Modem West’s impact on the rest 
of the World tallies closely with the Modern West’s own dating of its 
genesis in the subjective terms of a psychological break, in Modern 
Western souls, with the Modem West’s own past. 

From the Modem West’s own point of view, its modernity had begun 
at the moment when Western Man had thanked, not God, but himself 
that he was as different a being from his ‘medieval’ predecessor as the 
Pharisee claimed to be from the publican in the parable. 3 The cultural 
Pharisaism of the Modern Western peoples on the Atlantic seaboard of 
Europe dated, like their technological conquest of the Ocean, from the 
turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of the Christian Era, and we 
can name the objective revolutionary event which had brought about 
this subjective revolution in an ocean-faring Western Man’s mind. The 
Western peoples on the Atlantic seaboard of Europe who, in the sixteenth 
century, launched out on the face of the deep and made their way as far 

1 For example, the encounters, enumerated on pp. 108-9, above, in which one of the 
parties had been a ‘fossil', arc not all examined in IX b (ii), below. 

J This hypothesis was, of course, a version, couched in a Modem Western scientific 
idiom, of the Hellenic myth of the genesis of the goddess of procreation, Aphrodite, from 
the foam of the sea. J Luke xviii. 11. 



A PLAN OF OPERATIONS u 5 

and wide as its waters could carry them took the same contemptuous 
view of their own fifteenth-century ancestors as the fifteenth-century 
Italians had taken of these Transalpine and Transmediterranean Western 
contemporaries of theirs when they had stigmatized them as ‘barbarians’ ; l 
and the sixteenth-century Spaniards, Portuguese, French, English, and 
Dutch had in fact taken over this point of view from its Italian origina¬ 
tors. They had taken it over as part of their reception of a local Italian 
form of the Western culture that had differentiated itself during the later 
Middle Ages. 2 It was in virtue of this Italianization that these sixteenth- 
century Westerners beyond the bounds of Italy had become conscious 
of a breach of cultural continuity between themselves and their own 
immediate local predecessors, and this conversion of the non-Italian 
Western peoples to the Italians’ way of life had likewise occurred at the 
turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. 3 

Our criteria thus agree in supporting the traditional dating of the emer¬ 
gence of the Modern Western World in the last quarter of the fifteenth 
century. 4 The Italianization of a ‘barbarian’ majority of the Western 
Society, the converts' repudiation of their pre-Italianate past, and 
the conquest of the Ocean by the Italianized Western peoples on the 
Atlantic seaboard of Europe all occurred in this generation. On this 
showing, we need not hesitate to accept this date as marking the 
emergence of a Modern Western Society that had proceeded to make an 

1 See III. iii. 299-310. 

2 On pp. 109-10, above, we have already noticed that this impact of Northern Italy on 

the rest of Western Christendom at the transition from the ’medieval’ to the ‘modem’ 
age of Western history is an instance of the ‘internal’ type of encounter within the bosom 
of a single civilization. J See V. vi. 340-1. 

* On the subjective criterion of feeling, the Italians, of course, had been ‘modern’ 
since at least the thirteenth century, and the Flemings since at least the fourteenth; but, 
for rite purpose of the present enterprise of making a survey of encounters between 
civilizations that have been one another’s contemporaries, it would be a mistake to 
include the Italians’ encounters with their non-Westem neighbours among the Modern 
West’s encounters on the strength of this subjective criterion alone. In the expansion 
of the Modern West over the face of the whole World since the last quarter of the fif¬ 
teenth century of the Christian Era, Italy had plaved little part beyond Genoa’s some¬ 
what passive role as the birthplace of Columbus. While the Western peoples along the 
European seaboard of the Atlantic were opening up new worlds across the Ocean, the 
Italians were content to remain landlocked within the shores of the Mediterranean and, 
within these relatively narrow maritime confines, to play out the last rounds of a game 
which had already become a losing one by the time when, at the turn of the fifteenth 
and sixteenth centuries, the West European peoples had snatched victory for the West 
out of defeat in her relations with her neighbours by turning their backs on a familiar 
Mediterranean and committing themselves to a previously untamed Atlantic. At this 
turning-point in Western history the Atlantic Western peoples were moved to abandon 
the Mediterranean, and the Italians to cling to it, not merely by the divergent influences 
of their respective geographical locations, but also—and this perhaps more imperatively 
—by the historical fact that, in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the 
Italians—thanks precisely to their precocious achievement of modernity in this last 

I ihase of she ‘medieval’ chapter of Western history—had succeeded in entering into the 
ibours of their Transalpine and Tranrmediterrancan fellow Western Christians— 
Catalans, Aragonese, Navarrese, Castilians, Normans, French, English, Germans— 
whose partners they had been in the aggressive expansion of a Medieval Western 
Christendom across the Mediterranean at the expense of the East Roman Empire and 
the successor-states of the ‘Abbasid and Andalusian Umayyad caliphates. Details of this 
transformation of Crusader principalities into Venetian, Genoese, and Florentine 
colonial empires will be found in III. iii. 347, n. 1. This Italian epilogue to the history 
of the medieval encounter between the Western, Syriac, and Orthodox Christian socie¬ 
ties dragged on till as late as a.d. 1797, when the termination of Venetian rule over the 
Ionian Islands liquidated the last remnant of the last Italian colonial empire in the 
Levant. 


1x6 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
impact on all the rest of Mankind. In the light of this chronological 
conclusion, however, we may prognosticate that, however well this 
literally world-wide impact of the West may serve our turn as a ‘bull¬ 
dozer’ for forcing an entry into the historical jungle of intertwined 
cultural entanglements which we have set ourselves to explore, it will 
be of less avail for our purpose when we pass on from this preliminary 
survey of the facts to our ulterior enterprises of attempting to analyse, 
first the plot of the play, 1 and then the process of psychological action 
and reaction in the relations between the actors. 1 

In these two inquiries, Time is of the essence of the problem, since 
the psychological reverberations of collisions between contemporary 
societies do not produce their ultimate social effects until they have 
travelled down below the upper surface of the Psyche—over which the 
conscious Will and Intellect skate as swiftly as water-spiders on the 
surface of an unfathomable tarn—and have stirred the obstinately slow- 
moving depths of the underlying abyss of the Subconscious. However 
quickly the conscious clement in the psyche of a human being whose 
social environment has been disturbed by the impact of alien cultural 
influences may succeed in adjusting its thought and action to the new 
social predicament that the impact has produced, this superficial re¬ 
orientation is not effective in itself, since the Intellect alone moves 
nothing, 3 while the Will is only effective to the degree in which it 
succeeds in inducing the Subconscious Reservoir of the Psyche to lend 
itself to the Will’s aim by suffering the Will to draw upon this amor¬ 
phous yet exclusive source of psychic energy and to put it to work by 
canalizing it into a deliberate effort to attain some definite objective. 
The pace at which the subconscious element in the Psyche habitually 
moves is thus not merely the limiting, but the governing, factor in the 
determination of the time that an encounter between two contemporary 
civilizations will take, from first to last, to work itself out; and the usual 
Time-scale of the workings of the Subconscious in this province of the 
realm of social life had been of a much higher order of magnitude than 
the 450 years which, at the time of writing, was the utmost length of time 
during which the impact of the Modern West had so far been making 
itself felt in the life of any of its contemporaries. 

The relative shortness of a span of not more than four and a half cen¬ 
turies in this particular social and psychological context becomes mani¬ 
fest as soon as we turn our attention from the set of encounters in which 
a living Modern Western Society had been engaged with other living 
societies to encounters in which a living historian could feel confident 
that he was in a position to know the whole story because the parties to 
these encounters were none of them any longer alive. 

If we measure off the history of the impact of the Modern West on 
its contemporaries, down to the time of writing, against the history of 
the impact of the Hellenic Civilization, in the corresponding chapter of 
its history, on the Hittite, Syriac, Egyptiac, Babylonic, Indie, and Sinic 

' In Part IX C, below. . J In Part IX D. below. 

* Jiafna S’ aM) ovO(v KiveT. —Aristotle: Ethica Nicomaehea, Z, 2 (p. 1139 a), 
quoted in III. iii. 231, n. 1. 



ii7 


A PLAN OF OPERATIONS 
societies, and if, for purposes of this chronological comparison, we 
equate, as we reasonably may, 1 Alexander’s crossing of the Hellespont 
in 334 b.c. with Columbus’s crossing of the Atlantic in a.d. 1492, the 
four and a half centuries that bring us down to the year a.d. 1952 in the 
Modern Western record will bring us, in the equivalent ‘Modern 
Hellenic’ record, to the year a.d. 126; and this date is only a few years 
later than the probable date of the correspondence on the question of 
policy towards the Christians which passed between the Younger Pliny 
and the Emperor Trajan when Pliny was serving as the Emperor’s 
special high commissioner in the Roman imperial province of Bithynia 
and Pontus. 

In a Hellenizing World early in the second century of the Christian 
Era the Christian Church loomed no larger, in the sight of an Hcllenically 
educated dominant minority, than the Baha’i and Ahmadi sects 2 were 
figuring in the sight of the corresponding class in a Westernizing World 
mid-way through the twentieth century. In a generation in which the 
supremacy of a sceptical philosophy was ‘palpable and audible’ on the 
intellectual surface of Hellenic life, what rational Hellene could have 
divined that, in a subconscious psychic abyss below the seemingly well- 
founded basis of his own philosophical Weltanschauung, a ‘determina¬ 
tion’ was 'slowly maturing’ in the hearts of the people of his world 'to 
put themselves under the authority of a new dogma’,* and that this slow 
long-term spiritual tendency was moving, with a current as powerful as 
it was imperceptible, towards a triumph of Christianity over Hellenism 
within two hundred years of Pliny’s and Trajan’s day? This historical 
parallel—and it is a legitimate one—indicates how utterly the future 
might be hidden in a.d. 1952 from the mental vision of a Western 
student of the impact of the West on the World who happened to have 
been born only four hundred years after the beginning of this set of 
encounters between living civilizations. 

Moreover, our parallel between a Modern Western and an analogous 
Hellenic impact on a contemporary world gives us the further indication 
that, in reckoning the Modern Western impact to have been at work 
for some four hundred and fifty years down to the time of writing, we 
have been operating with a figure that represents a maximum and is 
considerably higher than the average. 

It w r as only in the impact of Western Christendom on the indigenous 
civilizations of the New World that the equivalent of Alexander’s con¬ 
quest of the Achaemenian Empire had occurred at a corresponding date 
in the Time-chart of Western history. The Spaniards’ conquest of 


1 The parallel holds good in subjective, as well as in objective, terms. Objectively, 
Alexander’s march from the Hellespont to the Hydaspes ia comparable in scale with 
da Gama's voyage from Lisbon to India and with Columbus's from Palo* to the New World: 
subjectively, the post-Alexandrine Hellene* took the reception of an Attic version of 
Hellenism in Macedonia, and the Atticizcd Macedonians’ conquest of the Achaemenian 
Empire, a* marking the beginning of a new era in Hellenic history as definitely as the 
Western peoples of the Atlantic seaboard of Europe felt their own Modem Age to be 
marked off from its ‘medieval’ predecessor by their reception of Italian culture and their 
conquest of the Ocean (see V. vi. 339 and 342, and VI. vii. 299-300). 

J Sec V. v. 174-6. 

1 Bevan, Edwyn Robert: Stoics and Sceptics (Oxford 1913, Clarendon Press), pp. 
140-1, quoted in V. V. 558. 



1x8 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
Mexico and the rest of Central America in and after a.d. 1521, and of the 
Inca Empire and the rest of the Andean World in and after a.d. 1533, 
had corresponded in its date, as well as in the crude violence of its 
physical force and the shattering subversivcncss of its psychological 
effect, to the conquest of the Egyptiac, Syriac, and Babylonic worlds by 
Alexander’s Macedonians. In the World as a whole, however, the mari¬ 
time expansion of the Modem West had had to pay for its ubiquity by 
being slower in taking political and cultural effect than the overland 
expansion of a post-Alexandrine Hellenism. While the comparatively 
fragile civilizations of the New World had been overwhelmed at the first 
onset of the militant landing-parties from ocean-going Spanish ships, 
not one single province of one single non-Westcm civilization in the 
Old World had been conquered, more Alexandrino, by Western force of 
arms before the campaigns (gerebantur a.d. 1757-60) which had resulted 
in the British East India Company’s acquiring a virtual sovereignty over 
Bengal and Bihar, and it had not been till the launching of a British 
offensive against the MarSthas on all Indian fronts in a.d. 1803 that any 
Modem Western empire-builders on non-Western ground cast of the 
Atlantic had made lightning conquests on the scale of Alexander of 
Maccdon’s sweep from the Hellespont to the Caspian Gates in 334-330 
b.c. or Demetrius of Bactria’s sweep over Northern India in 183 B.c. 

Furthermore, when we pass on from the spectacle of the forcible 
imposition of an alien civilization through acts of military conquest to 
consider the voluntary reception of it through a process of cultural con¬ 
version, we find that, in this field, the duration of the process down to 
the year a . d . 1952 had been, in the Old World, not 450 years, but some 
250 at the longest. 

The attempts of Western intruders in the Early Modern Age of 
Western history to propagate an integrally Christian Western culture 
in partibus Orientis had, in the end, all been signally defeated, after 
apparently promising starts, by outbursts of xenophobia in the mission 
fields that had been as decisive as they had been vehement. The Japanese 
had put an end to a Western Christian cultural penetration between 
a.d. 1614 and a.d. 163s; 1 the contemporary Abyssinians had taken 
parallel action in the fourth decade of the seventeenth century; 2 the 
Chinese had taken it at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth 
centuries. 3 It had not been till the last quarter of the seventeenth century 
that the West had begun to make peaceful cultural conquests that, by 
a.d. 1952, had proved themselves more durable, at least, than the 
sixteenth-century fiascos, unwarrantable though it would still have been 
to assume that they were to prove permanent. 

The version of the Modern Western culture that had thus at last 
begun to make headway in the Old World, some two hundred years after 
the Western conquest of the Ocean, was not the full-blooded Western 
Christian Civilization which the Abyssinians, Japanese, and Chinese had 
rejected after making trial of it; it was a secular abstract from it, 4 

1 See II. ii. 366, n. 2; V. v. 365; and pp. 316-24, below. 

1 See II. ii. 366. J Sec V. v. 365-7, and pp. 3*6-24, below. 

4 As the present writer sees it, an elimination of Religion, not an introduction of 



A PLAN OF OPERATIONS 


”9 


strained off in a cynically negative spirit by a late-scvcntccnth-century 
generation of Westerners who had become alienated from Christianity 
itself in their revulsion from Wars of Religion which, in the domestic life 
of Western Christendom for 150 years past, had been running an ever 
more devastating yet never any more conclusive course; 1 and, since an 
exotic potion is the less hard to swallow, the thinner and more tasteless 
the brew, 2 it is no surprise—and also assuredly no accident—that the 
generation which witnessed this spiritual revolution in the bosom of the 
Western World should also have witnessed a revulsion in the feelings of 
Orthodox Christian peoples towards the Western culture. 

In the fifteenth century, Orthodox Christians had acquiesced in the 
political domination of the Muslim 'Osmanlis as a less odious alternative 
than a reception of the Western Christian way of life in the then current 
religious terms of acknowledging the ecclesiastical supremacy of the 
Pope. Towards the close of the seventeenth century the descendants of 
these same Orthodox Christians eagerly inscribed themselves as pupils 
in a new-model Western school in which Technology had been sub¬ 
stituted for Theology as the obligatory principal subject. This revolution 
in the Orthodox Christian attitude towards the West in response to the 
West’s own revolutionary revaluation of traditional Western spiritual 

Science, was the essence of the seventeenth-century Western cultural revolution. The 
scientific outlook, in itself, was not at that time a novelty in the Western Society's 
spiritual constitution. It had been an ingredient in the Western Weltanschauung ever 
since the twelfth-century Aristotelian renaissance (see X. i*. 45-48). What was new was 
the elevation of Science from a subordinate position, in which it had been made to 
serve as Religion's handmaid, to the throne from which Religion had now been ig- 
nominiously ejected; and this revolutionary rise in Science's prestige in Western eyes, 
and revolutionary liberation of Science in the West from traditional religious checks and 
balances, were the innovations that now gave the Western Civilization its new ithos and 
its new penetrative power in its impacts on alien bodies social. 

This would be the present writer’s commentary on the following striking passage in 
one of Professor Herbert Butterfield's works: 

'The seventeenth century . . . did not merely bring a new factor into history in the 
way we often assume—one that must just be added, so to speak, to the other permanent 
factors. The new factor immediately began to elbow at the other ones, pushing them out 
of their places, and, indeed, began immediately to seek control of the rest, as the apostles 
of the new movement had declared their intention of doing from the very start. The 
result was the emergence of a kind of Western Civilization which when transmitted to 
Japan operates on tradition there as it operates on tradition here—dissolving it and hav¬ 
ing eyes for nothing save a future of brave new w-orlds . . . When we speak of Western 
Civilization being carried to an Oriental country like Japan in recent generations, we 
do not mean Graeco-Roman philosophy and humanist ideals, we do not mean the 
Christianising of Japan, we mean the science, the modes of thought and alt that appa¬ 
ratus of civilisation which were beginning to change the face of the West in the latter 

half of the seventeenth century-It was a civilisation that could cut itself away from 

the Graeco-Roman heritage in general, away from Christianity itself—only too con¬ 
fident in its power to exist independent of anything of the kind. Wc know now that what 
was emerging towards the end of the seventeenth centurv was a civilisation exhilaratingly 
new perhaps, but strange as Nineveh and Babylon. That is why, since the rise of 
Christianity, there is no landmark in history that is worthy to be compared with this.' 
(Butterfield, H.: The Origins 0/ Modern Science, 1300-1S00 (London, 1949, Bell), pp. 

7 Why wns^it that this secularized version of the Western culture had the corrosive effect 
on the lives of assaulted societies to which Professor Butterfield draws attention in this 
passage ? As the writer of this Study secs it, this corrosiveness was due not to the addition 
of a new ingredient but to the excision of an old one. In breaking away from the religious 
core of a fissile Western Civilization, this secular technological flake became a less un¬ 
inviting and at the same time a more deadly bait for any alien society to which it might 
be proffered (see further, pp. e30-42, below). , 

• Sec IV. iv. 142-3, 150, 184. 2*7-8, *nd 643-5; V. v. 669-71; and V. vi. 316-17. 

2 See pp. 514-21. below. 



120 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
values would assuredly have produced some equivalent of the Petrine 
Revolution in Russia, even if the personal genius of Peter the Great 1 had 
not happened to make its dramatic epiphany on the imperial throne of 
Muscovy at that historic moment. 

The voluntary reception of a secularized form of the Western culture 
by the Muscovite and Ottoman Orthodox Christians towards the close 
of the seventeenth century was, however, only the harbinger of a move¬ 
ment in which the other non-Western societies of the Old World took 
their time over following suit. 

In the Islamic Society, for example, such trifling symptoms as a 
Dutch-inspired passing craze for growing tulips during the chapter of 
Ottoman history that had consequently won the name of 'the Tulip 
Period’ (circa a.d. 1718-36), 2 and an Italian touch in the decoration of 
mosques built in the eighteenth century of the Christian Era in Con¬ 
stantinople, were the only portents of Westernization until the shock of 
defeat at the hands of a recently Westernized Orthodox Christian Power 
in the Great Russo-Turkish War of a.d. 1768-74 inspired Sultan Selim 
III (imperabat a.d. 1789-1807) to attempt the serious and controversial 
enterprise of radically Westernizing the Ottoman military system. 3 
Thus in Ottoman history the question of Westernization did not become 
a live issue till the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of the 
Christian Era, and the failure of Sultan Selim’s first essay was followed 
by nearly a century and a half of reluctant half-measures and disappoint¬ 
ing set-backs before the Ottoman Turkish people were moved, by the 
supreme shock of defeat in the General War of a.d. 1914-18 and its 
political and military aftermath, to commit themselves at long last to a 
whole-hearted adoption of the Westernization policy as the manifest 
only alternative to national extinction. 

The Ottoman Turks who thus lagged so far behind their Serb and 
Greek Orthodox Christian subjects in taking the path of Westernization 
were, however, in the vanguard of the Muslim travellers along this 
cultural road, and were abreast, if not ahead, of the pioneer Westernizers 
in all other non-Western societies in the Old World with the one excep¬ 
tion of Orthodox Christendom. In the Hindu Society the Bengalis 
began to open their minds to the reception of the Western Civilization 
before the close of the eighteenth century as a result of their experience 
of Western rule from a.d. 1757 onwards, but in this they were at least a 
generation ahead of any other Hindu people, and the Westernization of 
the Hindu Society as a whole did not set in until after the political 
reunification of India under a Western raj in the course of the nineteenth 
century. As for the Far Eastern Society, the reception of the Western 
Civilization did not begin before the fifth decade of the nineteenth 
century in China, and not before the sixth decade of the same century 
in Japan. In the year a.d. 1952 the re-opening of Japan’s doors to the 
West in a.d. 1854, after a lock-out that had lasted for 216 years (a.d. 
1638-1854), was not yet a century old. 

The relative lowness of these figures in the chronology of the living 

1 Sec III. iii. 278-83. 1 See V. vi. 290. 

J See III. iii. 48 *nd V. vi. 221. 



A PLAN OF OPERATIONS 121 

non-Wcstcrn civilizations’ encounters with the Modem West up to date 
comes out when we turn to consider the chronology of the cultural 
relations between a post-Alexandrine Hellenic Civilization and its con¬ 
temporaries. 

At the time of writing in the twentieth century of the Christian Era 
this encounter between the World and Hellenism was manifestly long 
since over, so that it was possible for the historian to follow the whole 
story of it from beginning to end and to ascertain how long it had taken 
for each of the divers consequences of the encounter to work itself out; 
and, when the twentieth-century observer felt his way back into the past 
in quest of the latest discernible cultural interactions between Hellenism 
and other civilizations, he did not have to probe deeper than the twelfth 
century of the Christian Era in order to strike the historical evidence for 
which he was prospecting. In that century both the Far Eastern World 
in the last days of the Northern Sung Dynasty in China and of 'the 
Cloistered Emperors’ in Japan 1 and the Syriac World in the last days 
of the successor-states of a foundered Umayyad Caliphate in Andalusia 
and a foundered 'Abbasid Caliphate in South-Western Asia and Egypt 
were still reacting to the impact of Hellenism with a vigour that leaves 
no room for doubt. In the Far East in that age the visual arts were still 
being inspired by the abiding influence of an Hellenic art which, travel¬ 
ling at the heels of an Alexander of Macedon and a Demetrius of Bactria, 
had continued, long after these Hellenic conquerors’ empires had passed 
away, to radiate into regions where the earth had never been shaken by 
the tramp of the Phalanx; and in the Syriac World of the same age an 
Hellenic philosophy and science that had come to maturity in the mind of 
Alexander’s preceptor Aristotle were working in Oriental minds through 
the medium of the Arabic language with a creatively stimulating effect 
which Hellenism had never been able to exert, at this deep cultural 
level, during a previous millennium of Hellenic military and political 
domination 2 under which the minds of the Hellenic rulers’ non- 
Hellenic subjects had been prejudiced against the reception of the 
intellectual fruits of the Hellenic genius by a resentment at the presence 
in their midst of an alien intruder who had thrust his civilization upon 
them by force of arms. 

Thus in the Syriac as well as in the Far Eastern World the influence 
of Hellenism in the twelfth century of the Christian Era was still not 
only vigorous but also fruitful; and this important last phase in the 
history of the encounter between a post-Alexandrine Hellenism and 
these two other civilizations was working itself out some fifteen hundred 
years after Alexander’s crossing of the Hellespont in the year 334 b.c. 
had inaugurated this episode in the story of Helleno-Syriac relations, 
and some 1,350 years after Demetrius’s passage of the Hindu Kush in 
183 B.c. had started a train of historical developments that had resulted 
in the transit of Greek art, in the service of the Mahayana, from the 


* bee IV. iv. 94 and V. vj. 303. . . 

« The Time-span between Alexander’s conquest of the Achsemenian Empire in the 
fourth century b.c. and the Primitive Muslim Arabs’ liquidation of Roman rule south 
of the Taurus in the seventh century of the Christian Era. 



122 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
banks of the Jumna to the banks of the Yellow River. To arrive at corres¬ 
ponding stages in the uncompleted histories of the encounters between 
the Modern West and its living contemporaries, a twentieth-century 
student of contacts between civilizations would have to cast forward 
into the Future some 1,200 years beyond his own day, considering 
that the history of a contact between the Modem West and Orthodox 
Christendom, which had begun in the seventeenth century of the 
Christian Era, would run into the thirty-second century if it were to 
attain the Time-span of 1,500 years that had been the duration of 
the encounter between Hellenism and the Syriac Civilization, while the 
history of a contact between the Modern West and Japan which, in 
the writer’s generation, was still less than a hundred years old, would 
run into the same thirty-second century if it was to have the 1,350 years’ 
duration of the encounter between Hellenism and the Indie Civilization. 

On the index of this Time-scale we can estimate the measure of a 
twentieth-century observer’s inability to foresee the ultimate psycho¬ 
logical effects of the impacts of the Modern Western Civilization upon its 
living contemporaries, when we consider how much of what this same 
twentieth-century observer did know about the ultimate psychological 
effects of the corresponding impacts of a post-Alexandrine Hellenism 
would have been unknown to him if, instead of his being able to watch 
the whole story unfolding itself over a Time-span of a minimum 
length of 1,350 years and a maximum of 1,500, the accident of his 
own position in the chronological series had confronted him with the 
mental iron curtain of the human mind’s ignorance of the Future at a 
date not much farther removed than two and a half centuries from the 
beginning of this fiftecn-hundred-years-long tale. 

If latter-day students of History had been thus compelled to confine 
their historical vision of the impact of Hellenism within this narrow 
chronological compass of one quarter of a millennium, then, in that 
imaginary situation—as they could sec, in the light of the knowledge 
which they actually commanded—not only the last phase but all other 
really momentous incidents in the story would have been still lying 
beyond their range of historical vision. On a range as short as 250 years 
the beginning, as well as the end, of the influence of Hellenic philosophy 
and science on Arabic philosophy and science, and of Hellenic art on 
Chinese and Japanese art, would still have been hidden below their 
historical horizon, and so would the final liquidation of Hellenic rule on 
Syriac ground by Arab force of arms in the seventh century of the 
Christian Era, which, as we have seen, was the psychologically requisite 
prelude to a hearty reception of Greek thought in Arabic dress by Syriac 
minds. On these thus imaginarily blinkered latter-day observers’ side of 
the close confines of their field of vision, they would just have caught a 
glimpse of the earliest violent Oriental reactions against an Hellenic 
political domination—the infiltration of the Parni into Parthia in the 
third century B.c.; the more militant anti-Hellenic insurrections in 
Egypt and Judaea in the second century B.c.; and the subsequent collapse 
of the Seleucid Power—without having been able to guess either that, 
in the last century b.c., Rome was going to consolidate the political 



A PLAN OF OPERATIONS 123 

heritage of the Seleucids and the Ptolemies west of the Euphrates or 
that, after Syria and Egypt had thus been retained under Hellenic 
rule for a further 700 years as provinces of the Roman Empire, 
Roman rule south of the Taurus would eventually be liquidated in its 
turn by a feat of Arab arms as abruptly as the Achaemcnian Empire had 
been liquidated by a feat of Macedonian arms at the inauguration of this 
historical episode, a thousand years back. 

More than that, these chronologically handicapped Western students 
of History would have remained uninitiated into the most important of 
all the consequences that the impact of a post-Alexandrine Hellenism 
was to bring in its train; for they would have had hardly an inkling of the 
religious response which, at the point in the story where an imaginary 
mental iron curtain cut their vista off, the Orientals were about to make 
to an Hellenic military challenge. What observer—Greek or Jew, Bar¬ 
barian, Scythian, bond or free 1 —could have guessed, if he had been 
born into a Hellenizing World no later than 250 years after Alexander’s 
passage of the Hellespont, that the intellectual influence of Hellenic 
thought on Oriental minds was to be long anticipated in date, and 
utterly eclipsed in importance as measured by its effect on the terrestrial 
destiny of Mankind, by a spiritual influence of Oriental religion on 
Hellenic souls? How could any observer have foreseen, from so prema¬ 
ture a chronological station, that there would be, not only a change of 
plane, from the political to the cultural level, and a change of ethos, 
from violence to gentleness, in the encounter between the Hellenes and 
their Oriental victims, but also a reversal in the roles of the actors—a 
reversal in which the initiative would pass from the Hellenic to the 
Oriental side ? 

This turning of the tables in the subsequent history of the relations 
between victors who had won their battle, and vanquished who had lost 
theirs, on the material plane of physical force was a more marvellous 
victory than any ever won by an Alexander of Macedon or a Demetrius 
of Bactria or a S'ad b. abi Waqqas or an 'Amr b. al-'As, just because it 
was not gained over adversaries in a counter-offensive, stimulated by a 
thirst for a revanche , after the pattern of the 'holy war’ in which Amosis 
expelled the Hyksos from the Delta or the Ming the Mongols from 
China-within-the-Wall. The Oriental evangelists of the higher religions 
succeeded in taking their Hellenic military conquerors spiritually captive 
because they approached them, not with animus, as enemies to be 
overthrown, but with love, as souls to be saved. Alexander of Macedon’s 
military conquest of the Achaemcnian Empire and Demetrius of 
Bactria’s pounce upon the Maurya Raj received this rejoinder in a 
language that ignored the argument of the sword when Kanishka was 
converted to the Mahayana some two and a half centuries after Deme¬ 
trius’s military exploit, and Constantine to Christianity some six and a 
half centuries after Alexander's similar triumph over Darius. To trans¬ 
late the story from personal into institutional terms, we may say that the 
Catholic MahSyana was the Indie Society’s reply to the Bactrian Greek 
and Kushan empires, and the Catholic Christian Church the Syriac 

» Col. iii. n. 



124 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
Society’s reply to the Seleucid and Roman empires. These universal 
churches were the new works of creation that were generated by the 
impacts of Hellenism on the Indie and Syriac worlds; and the average 
of the lengths of time that the peripeteia took to work itself out from 
Demetrius's day to Kanishka's and from Alexander’s to Constantine’s 
was, as will be noticed, just about twice as long as the longest contact, up 
to date, between the Modem West and any of its living contemporaries. 

The course of the past and therefore known encounters between a 
post-Alcxandrine Hellenism and its Syriac and Indie sisters did not 
warrant any presumption that the still untransacted future passages in 
the encounters of the Modem West with other living civili2ations would 
follow the same course or anything like it. There were, however, two 
expectations which this historical parallel might perhaps legitimately 
suggest. The first was that the two hundred and fifty years during which 
the Modern West had been making its impact, up to date, on Orthodox 
Christendom were likely to prove in retrospect to be a small instalment 
of the whole story by comparison with the length of the instalments 
which, at that date, were still due to follow. The second legitimate 
expectation, in the light of the Hellenic precedent, was that, however 
widely the denouement of the play in which the Modern West was the 
protagonist might differ from that of the Hellenic drama in substance, 
it was likely at least to resemble it in the subjective point of being an 
outcome that would have been utterly surprising to a spectator whose 
ticket had actually admitted him to witness the performance of only the 
first act. The astonishment that a miraculous ’pre-view’ of the dramatic 
situation in the thirty-second century would have produced in the mind 
of a twentieth-century observer of an historical drama entitled ‘the World 
and the West’ might be augured by imagining what the feelings of the 
Hellenic philosopher-historian Poscidonius of Apamea (vivebat circa 
135-51 b.c.) would have been if he could have foreseen the state of the 
relations between the Syriac Civilization and Hellenism in the succes¬ 
sive generations of Constantine (imperabat a.d. 306-337), Mu'Swiyah 
(imperabat a.d. 661-6S0), and Avicenna (vivebat a.d. 980-1037). 

On this showing, a twentieth-century student of human affairs might 
expect to find the history of the encounters between the Modern West 
and its contemporaries comparatively unilluminating, for the same 
reason that had condemned the domestic history of the Western Civili¬ 
zation to be comparatively unilluminating for a study of the species of 
societies of which it was one representative. 1 An imperfect specimen is 
manifestly not the best choice for the purposes of scientific observation 
and research; and, in the science of human affairs, there is this blemish 
of imperfection in any historical episode in which less than the whole 
story is within the historian’s knowledge. Thus, while twentieth-century 
Western students of History might hope that the set of encounters in 
which the Modern West had been the hero—or the villain—might offer 
them a convenient starting-point for a survey of episodes of this category, 
they could not count on this still unfinished story’s proving equally 
serviceable to them thereafter in the subsequent stages of their inquiry. 

* See I. j. 36-37. 



A PLAN OF OPERATIONS 125 

When we pass on from a preliminary attempt to assemble the relevant 
facts to our ulterior enterprise of trying to interpret them, our standby 
will prove to be the parallel set of encounters between a post-Alcxandrine 
Hellenic Civilization and its contemporaries in which a twentieth- 
century student did know the whole story as it had unfolded itself, from 
beginning to end, over periods of time of a vastly greater order of magni¬ 
tude than 250, or even 450, years. 

The Time-span of fifteen hundred years over which the history of 
the Helleno-Syriac encounter extends, from the Hellenic conquest of the 
Achaemenian Empire by Alexander the Great to the Syriac reception of 
Greek thought in Arabic dress, will be shown by our survey to be a per¬ 
formance of unusual length; but we shall be able to draw upon the 
histories of other encounters which, though considerably shorter than 
that, had nevertheless likewise been illuminatingly longer than the 
encounters between the West and other living civilizations up to date. 
The encounter between the Syriac and Babylonic civilizations, for 
example, occupied some nine or ten centuries if we reckon that it began 
with Asshurnazirpal’s assault on Syria in 876 B.c. 1 and ended with 
the absorption of the mortal remains of the Babylonic Society into the 
still living tissues of the Syriac body social 2 in the first century of the 
Christian Era. 3 Again, the encounter between a Medieval Western 
Christendom, an Eastern Orthodox Christendom, and the Syriac World 
occupied some seven or eight centuries if we date its beginning in the 
eleventh century of the Christian Era, when the Western Christendom 
launched a general offensive against its two neighbours on a front ex¬ 
tending from Compostella to Edessa, and date its end at a.d. 1797, 
when the liquidation of the Venetian regime in the Ionian Islands liber¬ 
ated tire last remnant of a subject Orthodox Christian population from 
the domination of the Medieval Western Crusaders’ Italian successors. 4 

The social and psychological phenomena arising from these relatively 
long-drawn-out encounters will illuminate our study in later divisions 
of this Part. Our first task, however, is to carry out the operation of 
surveying the facts on the plan which we have now worked out. 


See IV. iv. 473, n. 3 

5 Sec I. i. 79-80 and 1x9; II. ii. £38^ IV. >Y-. 47 1 1 v - Y: 


v. 04, X22— 3, and 370. 

N.J., in June 1952, the writer 


> At the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, . . . .» . 

learnt from Professor O. Neugebaucr that the scries of cuneiform documents disinterred 
in Babylonia by Modern Western archaeologists, which had formerly included no 
documents of any dace later than the last century b.c., had now been extended chrono¬ 
logically by a recent discovery of documents of the first century of the Christian Era. 

* See p. 115, n. 4, above. The terminal date would be, not a.d. 1797, but a.d. 1945. 
if, in view of the implication of the Russian branch of Orthodox Christendom, as well 
as the main body, in the medieval encounter between an Orthodox Christendom and 
her Western sister, we were to reckon the episode as still not being closed so long as, 
on the continental front between a Russian Orthodox Christendom and the Western 
World, a remnant of Orthodox or ex-Orthodox Uniatc Ukrainians and White Russians 
still remained under Polish rule. In the following survey, however, the encounter 
between the Medieval Western Christendom and the Russian offshoot of an Eastern 
Orthodox Christendom is dealt with as a separate episode from the Medieval Western 
Christendom’s encounter with the main body of its Orthodox Christian sister society. 


126 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 


(II) OPERATIONS ACCORDING TO PLAN 

(a) ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MODERN WESTERN CIVILIZATION 

i. The Modem West and Russia.' 

Russia's * Western Question’ 

If the opening of the ‘modern’ chapter of Western history is to be 
dated at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of the Christian 
Era, 2 and the establishment of a Russian Orthodox Christian universal 
state in the eighth decade of the fifteenth century—which saw the politi¬ 
cal unification of Russian Orthodox Christendom through the incorpora¬ 
tion of the Republic of Novgorod into the Grand Duchy of Muscovy 1 — 
this outstanding political event in the history of the Orthodox Christian 
Society in Russia just anticipated the impact on Russia of the Western 
Civilization in its ‘modern’ form, and the subsequent chapter in the 
history of Russia’s ‘Western Question’ was all transacted while Russia 
was in her universal state phase. 

This ‘Western Question’ was already familiar to Russian minds in an 
older shape; for Russia’s encounter with the West in and after the six¬ 
teenth century was not her first contact with her Western neighbour and 
sister. A previous contact, in the Medieval Age of Western history, 
which is examined separately below, 4 had resulted, in the course of the 
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries of the Christian Era, in the establish¬ 
ment of Western Christian Polish and Lithuanian rule over large 
stretches of the original patrimony of Russian Orthodox Christendom, 
including, besides the entire domains of the White Russian and Ukrain¬ 
ian peoples, a western fringe of Great Russian territory round Smolensk ; s 
and the Moscow which, at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centur¬ 
ies, had recently become the capital of a Russian universal state had 
come, before that, to be the frontier fortress of an independent remnant 
of Russian Orthodox Christendom against a Western Christendom 
which had made those sweeping encroachments on her sister society’s 
ground. This previous encounter of Russia’s with a Medieval Western 
Christendom had an aftermath in the history of Russia’s subsequent 
relations with the Modem West. 

In the course of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries 
the Western Civilization’s hold over the Russian populations in Poland- 
Lithuania was strengthened by the cumulative cultural consequences of 
the political union of the Kingdom of Lithuania with the Kingdom of 
Poland, which was consummated in a.d. 1569, 6 and the ecclesiastical 
union of a large part of the Russian Orthodox Christian community in 
Poland-Lithuania with the Roman Catholic Church, which took place 
in a.d. 1594-6. In the detached fragment of a Russian Orthodox 
Christendom that was thus clamped on to the Western World by these 
two institutional bonds, the Western culture, in a Polish dilution of its 


• See xi, maps 40 and 65. * See 

J See IV. iv. 88; V. v. 3:2; and VI. vii. 32, with 


ment in n. 2. 

5 Sec II. ii. 172 and 175-6. 


a. 114-16, above, 
rince D. Obolensky's com- 
On pp. 356-7 and pp. 398-403, below. 

* See II. ii. 175. 



THE MODERN WEST AND RUSSIA 127 

modern distillation, succeeded—largely thanks to the missionary activi¬ 
ties of the Jesuits—in captivating the local land-owning aristocracy 
which had originally been Ukrainian, White Russian, or Lithuanian in 
nationality and Orthodox Christian or pagan in religion. While the 
cx-Orthodox peasantry who came under the ecclesiastical supremacy 
of the Papacy as a result of the ecclesiastical union of A.D. 1594-6 became 
members of a Uniate church which was allowed to retain most of its 
traditional rites and discipline, many members of the ex-Orthodox 
nobility travelled the whole length of the ecclesiastical road to Westerni¬ 
zation by becoming Roman Catholics of the Latin Rite. 

At the same time the political sovereignty over ex-Russian territories 
in which the Modern Western Civilization was gaining these converts 
was one of the stakes in a fluctuating military contest between a Russian 
universal state and a succession of Continental European Western 
Powers. In another conncxionit has already been pointed out 1 that, at 
the moment when an ownerless East Roman Imperial mantle was falling 
about a Muscovite Grand Duke’s shoulders as a consequence of the 
capture of Constantinople by the ‘Osmanlis in a.d. 1453, the Russian 
recipients of this ideological legacy from ‘the Second Rome’ were so 
exactingly preoccupied with the immediate task of arresting the advance 
of a Western aggressor who was already at their gates, and with the 
ulterior aspiration of eventually liberating the adjacent Russian Ortho¬ 
dox Christian populations which had fallen under a Western domination, 
that they were deaf to sly Western suggestions that they should assert 
their title to their East Roman Imperial heritage by challenging an 
Ottoman domination over non-Russian Orthodox Christian peoples 2 
who were sundered from Muscovy by the double barrier of the Eurasian 
Steppe 3 and the Black Sea. Meanwhile, at the western approaches to 

1 See the citation from Obolensky and the quotation from Sumner in VI. vii. 37, 
n. 1. 

3 On the agenda of Muscovite statesmen the first business was to challenge the West¬ 
ern domination over Russian Orthodox Christians in White Russia and the Ukraine. 
An undertaking to abstain from any form of oppression of Orthodox Christians under 
Lithuanian and Polish rule was obtained from Poland-Lithusnia by Muscovy in a.d, 
1686 and was followed un by active Muscovite intervention on those Orthodox Christ¬ 
ians’ behalf in a.d. 1718-25 (see Sumner, B. H.: Peler the Great and the Ottoman 
Empire (Oxford 1949, Blackwell), pp. 32-33; eundem: Peter the Great and the Emergence 
of Rustia (London 1950, English Universities Press), np. 181 and 183). A corresponding 
undertaking from the Ottoman Porte was sought by Muscovite diplomacy at Carlowitx 
in a.d. 1698-9 and at Constantinople in a.d. 1690-1700 (see eundem, Peter the Great 
and the Ottoman Empire. p. 32), but in this field the objective was not attained till a.d. 
1774. The first manifesto in which Russia declared herself the champion of the Ottoman 
Christians and called upon them to take up arms in a common struggle against the 
'Osmanlis was Peter the Great’s proclamation of March 17x1 (see ibid., p. 46), and 
Peter’s ill-starred invasion of Moldavia in the same year waa the first appearance of a 
Russian army within the confines of an Ottoman Orthodox Christendom. On this occa¬ 
sion 'a Russian army entered Moldavia and Russian cavalry watered their horses in the 
Danube ... for the first time for more than seven centuries’ (ibid., p. 30). In A.D. 969- 
72, when the pagan Russian war-lord Svyatoslav had passed that way, the valley of the 
Pruth had not yet been co!oni2ed by an Orthodox Christian population. 

J Sumner points out (in op. cit., pp. 14. 27. »nd 79 ) 'bat, so long as the Great Western 
Bay of the Eurasian Steppe remained a Nomad’s land, regular armies could not operate 
across it without risk of disaster, though it was a highly conductive medium for raids 
by the Crimean Tatar horse (sec ibid., p. 15, n. 3). Galitsin’s two attempts, in A.D. 1697 
and a.d. 1699, to invade the Crimea across the Steppe ended as unsuccessfully (see ibid., 
p. 15) as the Ottoman attempt in a.d. 1569 to seize and hold the Don-Volga portage 
(see the present Study, II. ii. 445, and pp. 225-7, below). When Peter the Great invaded 



128 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

Moscow, the ‘irrepressible conflict’ between Muscovy and the West over 
the allegiance of White Russia and the Ukraine went on for some five 
hundred years, reckoning from the middle of the fifteenth century, 
which saw the high tide of Lithuania’s expansion at the Russian 
Orthodox Christendom’s expense, 1 down to the close of the General 
War of a.d. 1939-45, when the annexation of Eastern Galicia to the 
Soviet Union brought back under Russian rule the last still unrecaptured 
residue of the Russian Orthodox Christian territories that had been 
conquered for the West in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries by 
Polish and Lithuanian arms. 2 

Channels of Western Cultural Radiation into Russia. 

The military and political victory which Russia thus eventually 
obtained over the West on this Continental European front was offset 
on the cultural plane by the consequent propagation of Modern 
Western influences from these semi-Westernizcd tracts of originally 
Russian ground into a Muscovy which had exposed herself to this 
Western cultural contamination by wresting one after another of the 
infected territories out of the hands of their Western conquerors and 
uniting them politically with a Muscovite citadel of Russian Orthodox 
Christendom which had never fallen under Western rule. The most 
important single event in this long-drawn-out process was Muscovy’s 
acquisition, in a.d. 1667, 3 of Kiev, the Ukrainian city which had been a 
pre-Muscovite Russia’s political and cultural capital, and which, under 
Polish rule, had latterly become a powerful transmitting-station for 
Western cultural influences. Under a Polono-Jesuit dispensation at 
Kiev, even the Orthodox Christian clergy who had rejected the ecclesias¬ 
tical union of a.d. 1594-6 had nevertheless been deeply affected by the 
culture and ethos of a Tridentine Roman Church; and, after the transfer 
of Kiev from Polish to Muscovite sovereignty, Peter the Great found 


Moldavia in a.d. 1711, he marched, not via the direct route across the Steppe, but via 
a roundabout route through the Polish Ukraine; and in A.D. 1739 Munich followed the 
same roundabout route with success, after having been foiled in a.d. 1738 in an attempt 
to invade Moldavia by the steppe-route (see Sumner, op. cit., p. 39, n. 3). The Steppe 
remained an obstacle to regular military operations until it had been colonized by a 
sedentary agricultural population, and this colonization did not begin till the plantation, 
in a.d. 1754. of a 'New Serbia' between the Dnicpr and the Bug, and did not get under 
way, full swing, till after the Russo-Turkish peace-settlement of a.d. 1774. 

* See II. ii. 172 and 175-6. 

* After the War of a.d. 1939-45 the Soviet Union completed the political unification, 
within her frontiers, of the entire geographical domain of the Ukrainian people by further 
acquiring Carpatho-Ruthcnia: a territory, adjoining Eastern Galicia and likewise in¬ 
habited oy Ukrainians, which had been attached to Czechoslovakia since the peace 
settlement after the War of a.d. 1914-18, and to Hungary before that. These Trans- 
carpathian Ukrainians were sundered from the main body of their nation by the barrier 
of the mountains, and there was no evidence that Carpatho-Ruthcnia had ever been 
associated politically with the rest of the Ukraine in any previous chapter of Ukrainian 
history. 

3 In the Muscovite-Polish Peace Treaty of Andrusovo, concluded in a.d. 1667, it was 
agreed that Kiev, which was at that moment in Muscovite hands, should remain under 
Muscovite occupation for two years longer, notwithstanding the fact that the city lay 
on the west bank of the River Dniepr, which, by the terms of the Treaty, was to be the 
permanent frontier between the two contracting parties. The Muscovites, however, did 
not ever evacuate Kiev, and Poland renounced her claim to it in a.d. 1686 (sec Allen, 
W. E. D.: The Ukraine, A History (Cambridge 1940, University Press), pp. 158 and 176). 



THE MODERN WEST AND RUSSIA 129 

pliant instruments among this Western-minded Kievan Orthodox 
clergy' for carrying through the measures 2 by which he succeeded in 
bringing a less tractable Muscovite Orthodox Church into line with his 
own Westernizing policy. 

This originally Russian but latterly semi-Westcrnized debatable 
territory on the continental .borderland between Muscovy and the 
Western World had not, however, been the principal field in which the 
encounter between Russia and the Western Civilization in its modern 
form had been taking place down to the time of writing on the morrow 
of the General War of a.d. 1939-45. F° r one thing, the Polish reflexion of 
the Modern Western culture was too dim—even when the rustic mirror 
had been polished up by skilful and assiduous Jesuit hands—to impress 
itself deeply on Muscovite Russian souls after the political annexation of 
this border to an expanding Muscovite Empire; and, when the process of 
Muscovite political expansion overland towards the West had gone on 
to embrace East European territories whose culture was completely 
Western in origin, the cultural effect of this political association had 
likewise been slight. During the hundred years (a.d. 1815-1915) for 
which 'Congress Poland’, for example, had been linked politically with 
‘All the Russias’ under the sovereignty of the Romanovs, Warsaw had 
exerted little more cultural influence on Moscow and St. Petersburg 
than Moscow and St. Petersburg had exerted during the same years on 
Warsaw. 1 In the crucial encounter between Russia and the Modern 
West the principals on the Western side had never, so far, been the 
relatively backward representatives of the Modern Western Civiliza¬ 
tion who were Russia’s immediate continental neighbours in Eastern 
Europe; they had been those maritime peoples on the European shores 
of the Atlantic who, at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, 
had taken over from the North Italians the leadership of the Western 
World and had initiated its successive enterprises in the modern chapter 
of its history. 

This latterly dominant group of maritime Western countries had 
come to include not only those in Western Europe, but also Russia’s 
immediate maritime neighbours along the east coast of the Baltic, from 
Courland to Finland inclusive, who all came under Russian sovereignty 
in the course of the eighteenth century; but, though, from the time of 
Peter the Great down to the Russian Communist Revolution of a.d. 
1917, the German barons and bourgeoisie of the Baltic provinces exer¬ 
cised an influence on Russian life which was out of proportion to their 
numbers, the influence of the West European peoples counted for much 
more, and this influence did not merely filter into Russia through Kiev 

> See Platonov, S.: Hisioire de la Russit da Origines d 1918 (Pari* 1929. Payot), pp. 
648-50. Cp. Kliutschcwskij, W. (K!uchev*kii, V.J: Geichichtt Rutslandt (Berlin 1925-6, 
Obelisk-Vcrlag, 4 vote.), vol. iv, p. 175. 

i See III. iti. 283, n. 2. 

1 Thi* nineteenth-century experience threw some light on the cultural prospect* of 
n latter-day political situation in which the western limits of Russia’s political ascen¬ 
dancy, after having receded, between the First and the Second World War, to the line 
along which it had run in the years A.D. 179J-5. stood once again on native Western 
ground—and this time as far westward as a line running from a westerly point on the 
southern shore of the Baltic Sea to an easterly point on the northern flank of the Austrian 
Alps (see p. 142, n. 6, below). 

B 2388 .vm 


F 


130 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
and Riga; it was also conveyed direct through ports of entry which the 
Russian Imperial Government deliberately opened to receive it. 

The earliest of these Russian water-gates for the direct reception of 
the Modern Western Civilization was the mouth of the Northern 
Dvina on the coast of the White Sea, which was reached by an English 
ship in a.d. 1553, some eleven years after the first Portuguese landfall 
on the coast of Japan. 1 The Muscovite Government responded by found¬ 
ing the port-town of Archangel there in a.d. 1584, and the Westerners 
who entered Russia by this route established an inland outpost in 'the 
Sloboda' 1 on the threshold of Moscow. The direct intercourse between 
Western Europe and Russia via the White Sea was thus inaugurated on 
the initiative of the West European mariners in the course of their 
sixteenth-century conquest of the Ocean, but the intensity of the in¬ 
fluence of the Modern Western Civilization on Russia was keyed up to a 
higher pitch when, in the opening years of the eighteenth century, the 
circuitous maritime route between Russia and Western Europe via 
Archangel was short-circuited, on Russian initiative, by the foundation 
of St. Petersburg, 3 and when the field within which this alien influence 
was allowed to exert itself in the interior of the Russian World was 
simultaneously expanded from the narrow limits of 'the Sloboda’ to 
embrace the entire domain of an empire which, in Peter’s day, already 
stretched all the way from the Baltic to the Pacific. 

Alternative Russian Responses to the Challenge of Western Technology 
In an intercourse between Russia and the Modern West which, by 
the time of writing, had been active for some 250 years at this high pitch 
of intensity, and, in a lower key, for some two hundred years before 
that, the plot of the drama was dictated by a perpetual interplay between 
the demonic technological prowess of the Modern Western World and 
a no less demonic determination in Russian souls to preserve Russia’s 
independence against all comers. The Russians had their hearts thus 
set on the independence of their society because their minds were 
convinced of the uniqueness of Russia’s destiny; and this Russian con¬ 
viction was something more than the common egocentric illusion that 
afflicts all societies and individuals in some degree. 4 The Russians' 

E liar sense of destiny had found expression, as we have seen, 5 in a 
f that the mantle of Constantinople had fallen on Moscow’s 
shoulders; and the pretensions of Constantinople—'the Second Rome’ 
—had been greater than those of Rome herself; for the pagan Roman 
Empire had believed in itself merely on the matter-of-fact mundane 
ground that Rome had been the ultimate victor in a competition be- 

* The first English landfall on the White Sea coast of Russia and the first Portuguese 
landfall on the coast of Japan were, both alike, unintentional achievements of ships that 
had been driven out of their course by bad weather. 

1 This Western Christian equivalent of a ghetto in pre-Petrine Muscovy has been 
noticed in II. ii. 230-2 and II f. iii. 280-2. ‘By the time of Peter’s boyhood there may 
have been some three thousand foreigners in all in Muscovy—almost entirely Protes¬ 
tant/—Sumner, B. H.: Peter the Great and the Emergence 0} Russia (London 1950, 
English Universities Press), p. 12. 

’ See II. ii. 157-8; V. vi. 343; and VI. vii. 221-2. 

4 For this illusion, see I. i. 157-64. 


i In VI. vii. 31-40. 



THE MODERN WEST AND RUSSIA 131 

tween the Great Powers of a post-Alexandrine Hellenic World for 
providing a disintegrating society with a universal state, whereas the 
Christian Roman Empire had fortified its Roman self-confidence with 
the transcendental Christian faith that the Orthodox Church had in¬ 
herited from Jewry the spiritual privilege of being God’s ‘Chosen 
People’. 

Moscow’s assumption of the role of a unique repository and citadel of 
Orthodoxy had been a cumulative process, beginning with the consolida¬ 
tion of an effective political power through the political unification of a 
still independent remnant of Russian Orthodox Christendom in the 
eighth decade of the fifteenth century 1 and culminating in the acquisi¬ 
tion of an imposing ecclesiastical authority through the establishment of 
an autocephalous Patriarchate of Moscow in a.d. 1589;* and this cen¬ 
tury-, which saw Muscovy thus fortified and consecrated, was also the 
century that saw the Muscovite remnant of Russian independence, in a 
domain already much reduced by Medieval Western encroachments, 
threatened more seriously than ever before by a Modern Western 
World armed with an unprecedented and unrivalled technological 
equipment. An impregnable Muscovite self-assurance thus found itself 
assailed by an irresistible Western material force, and this uncanny 
encounter presented to Russian souls a challenge to which they made 
three diverse responses. 

One Russian response was a totalitarian ‘Zealot’ reaction which found 
its typical exponents in ‘the Old Believers’. These fanatics broke with 
the official Muscovite Church and State over the question whether the 
traditional Muscovite version of Orthodox Christian ritual and discipline 
should or should not be brought into line with seventeenth-century 
Greek practice. 3 They obstinately refused to change one jot or tittle of 
their own parochial Muscovite custom; and the intransigence thus dis¬ 
played in a family quarrel within the bosom of the Orthodox Church 
declared itself, a fortiori, against a policy of adopting anything at all 
from a schismatic Western World. 4 They were unwilling to adopt even 
a Western technolog}' in which the faint virus of a Western spiritual 
tradition was certified, on the Western exporters’ label, to have been 
thoroughly sterilized. ‘The Old Believers’ would not harbour this 
professedly innocuous alien technology even for the laudable purpose of 
safeguarding Holy Russia’s independence by fighting a formidable 
assailant with his own lethal weapons. 

This totalitarian ‘Zealot’ reaction in Russia to the pressure of a Modern 
Western World was as sincere as it was logical. Trusting, as they did, 
wholly in God and not in Man, the Russian ‘Zealots’ were willing to 
stake the existence of their Russian Orthodox Christendom on their 
belief that God would faithfully save His people so long as they loyally 
kept His law; but they never came within sight of winning the power to 
put their belief to a practical test; for they remained an impotent 
minority which, when the moment came for action, was always 

« See VI. vii. if. * See VI. vii. 34 - 35 - s See VI. vii. 36-38. 

♦ See Sumner, B. H.: Peter the Great and the Emergence of Rusiia (London 1950, 
English Universities Press), p. 17 - 



i 3 2 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

brushed aside—not because the majority did not share the ‘Zealots’ ’ zeal 
for Russia’s independence, but because they did not believe that their 
common aim could be attained solely through faith without works. The 
making of Russia’s policy towards the Modern West never came into 
the ‘Zealots’ ’ hands; yet, though their reaction was repressed, it was not 
without effect as a subterranean influence when the exponents of an 
alternative policy were in the saddle. For example, 'the Slavophil 
Movement’ which was one of the nineteenth-century cultural phenomena 
of the ‘Herodian’ Petrine regime, and which could be explained, in these 
‘Herodian’ terms, as a Russian variation on the contemporary Romantic 
Movement in the West, revealed itself at the same time, from another 
standpoint, as being a muted expression of the native Russian ‘Zealot’ 
hostility to the Western culture—a hostility which, in an age when a 
Westernizing tendency was in the ascendant in Russia, found itself 
compelled to masquerade in some Western garb or other, 1 and therefore 
fastened upon an archaizing Western movement which was a native 
Western criticism of a latter-day industrial Western way of life. 2 

The thorough-going ‘Herodianism’ which was at the opposite extreme 
of the psychological gamut from the totalitarian ‘Zealotism’ of ‘the Old 
Believers’ was first translated from aspiration into act by the genius of 
the Russian ‘Zealots’ ’ bugbear Peter the Great. 1 The Petrine policy was 
to convert the Russian Empire from a Russian Orthodox Christian 
universal state into one of the parochial states of a Modern Western 
World, in which the Russian people was to take its place as one among 
a number of Western and Westernized nations. This policy sought to 
save Russia’s political independence and cultural autonomy, in a world 
in which the Modern Western way of life was the rule, by gaining admis¬ 
sion for Russia to membership in a Westerners’ club in which eighteenth- 
century enlightened monarchs did not carry their indulgence in 'the 
sport of kings' beyond the point of exercising their forces ‘by temperate and 
undecisive contests’. 4 The modesty and practicality of these aims, which 
were the objective merits of the policy, were also, however, its inherent 
subjective weaknesses; for, from the Russian standpoint, the Petrine 
policy could be denounced as a pursuit of certain means towards Russian 
ends at the cost of sacrificing the very ends which these means pre¬ 
supposed, and in virtue of which alone they were of any value or sig- 

1 See VI. vii. 38-39. 

1 For this aspect of the Modern Western Romantic Movement, see V. vi. 60. 

3 Sumner points out that one of the evidences of Peter’s genius, and secrets of his 
success, is to be found in the fact that, in his Westernizing reforms, he was giving prac¬ 
tical effect to a Westernizing tendency which was already in the air in Muscovy by the 
time when he came into power. ‘The greatness of Peter lies in the fact that to a large 
extent he gave shape to needs and aspirations growing within Muscovite Society of 
the late seventeenth century’ (Peter the Great and the Emergence of Russia (London 1950, 
English Universities Press), p. 3). Peter's father Alexis (imperabat a.d. 1645-76) had 
already gone far enough in this direction to be branded by 'the Old Believers’ as Anti¬ 
christ (sec ibid., p. 19) before he was relieved of this invidious identification by the 
transfer of the epithet to his still more objectionable son (see ibid., p. 66, and the present 
Study, III. iii. 281). ‘It is tragically ironic that [Prince V. v. Galitsin, one of the principal 
ministers of Peter's half-sister Sophia during her regency (eurrebat a.d. 1682-9)], whose 
ideas were so close to Peter's, had no share whatever in carrying into effect Peter's 
reforms’ (ibid., p. 26). 

* Gibbon. E. : The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap, xxxviii, 
ad fin., quoted in IV. iv. 148. 



THE MODERN WEST AND RUSSIA 133 

nificance in Russian eyes. In acquiescing in the Petrine policy the 
Russians were, in fact, resigning themselves to being, after all, 'like all 
the nations’, 1 and were implicitly renouncing Moscow’s pretension to 
the unique destiny of being the citadel of Orthodoxy: the one society in the 
World that was pregnant with the future hopes of Mankind. This impli¬ 
cation did not prevent Peter’s policy from being tried in Russia—and 
this over a period of more than two hundred years—but it did prevent it 
from ever winning the Russian people’s wholehearted support; and the 
long-suppressed insistence on the uniqueness of Russia’s destiny re¬ 
asserted itself in a Communist Russian reaction to the Modern West 
which found its opportunity in the Petrine reaction’s failure. 

Russian Communism was an attempt to reconcile this irrepressible 
Russian sense of destiny with the ineluctable necessity of coping with 
the Modern West’s technological prowess if Russia was to have any 
destiny at all. 2 The Communist solution for Russia’s perennial ‘Western 
Question’ was to harness the horse-power of the West’s redoubtable 
technique to the chariot of Russia’s incomparable destiny, instead of 
either subordinating Russia’s destiny, as the ‘Hcrodians’ were ready to 
subordinate it, to the exigencies of Westernization, or leaving it, as the 
‘Zealots’ were ready to leave it, in the hands of God; and, of all the three 
Russian answers to ‘the Western Question’, this was the only one that 
appeared to offer any chance of reconciling Russian faith with Western 
facts. This Russian Communist policy was, however, based on an im¬ 
plicit assumption that it was practically possible to appropriate one 
clement in an alien culture without having to adopt the rest of it, and 
this postulate that a culture is not indivisible remained to be proved. 3 
Meanwhile, it was impugned by the significant fact that, in making this 
very assumption, the Russian Communists were already following a 
Western lead. Their belief that cultural and political phenomena could 
all be reduced to economic terms, and that economic facts alone were 
realities and not illusions, was taken by them on faith from the Western 
philosopher-prophet Karl Marx; and, in seeking to rationalize the 
content of the Modern Western Civilization by discarding the element 
of liberal idealism and retaining nothing but an economic materialism, 
Marx had only been going one step farther along a road on which his 
liberal predecessors had entered when, in a revulsion from the Western 
Wars of Religion, they had sought to jettison the religious element in 
the Western tradition, while still retaining a secularized liberalism as an 
idealistic counter-weight to a banausic technology. 

The adoption of a Western ideology of any kind was indeed a para¬ 
doxical way of reasserting, against the Modern Western World, Russia’s 
pretension to be the heir to a unique destiny; and this paradox was a 
striking testimony to the strength—frankly recognized in the Petrine 
‘Hcrodian’ movement—of a current, carrying Russia in a Western direc¬ 
tion, which had not ceased to make its flow felt beneath the surface 

1 1 Sam. viii. 5 and 20. 

1 In virtue of thus striving to reconcile two conflicting exigencies which were both 
imperious, Russian Communism had in it an intrinsic ambivalence which is examined 
further on pp. 607-8, below. 

J This question is discussed on pp. 542-64, below. 


i 3 4 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
when the Petrine regime had been discredited and liquidated. The sub¬ 
stitution of a Marxian ideology derived from the West for an Orthodox 
Christianity derived from Byzantium, as the true faith of which Russia 
was the hallowed repository, was a paradox that was at the same time an 
inevitable corollary of the militant reaction towards Western pressure 
for which Russian Communism stood. 

Lenin and his successors divined that a policy of fighting the West 
with its own weapons could not hope to succeed if the weapons in 

Q uestion were conceived of in exclusively material terms; for, while 
'echnology was the spear-head of the Modern West’s assault on the rest of 
the contemporary world, the assailants might not have penetrated farther 
than the outer defences of their neighbours’ castles if they had delivered 
their attack with material weapons alone. The secret of the Modern 
Western Civilization’s amazing success in propagating itself to the ends of 
the Earth during the last 250 years before the Russian Communist Revo¬ 
lution of a.d. 1917 had lain in a masterly co-operation of the spiritual with 
the temporal arm. The breaches blown by the blast of a Modern 
Western technology had opened a passage for the spirit of a Modern 
Western Liberalism; and the voluntary capitulation of alien souls, 
imprimis Peter the Great’s, to the charm of the Modern Western secular 
culture had done more to make its fortune in the World than all the 
military conquests of a Cortds, Pizarro, Clive, or Wellesley. The latter- 
day leaders of the militant Russian reaction against the West well under¬ 
stood that, if Russia was to reassert against the West her own claim to be 
the child of Destiny, it would not be enough for her to make herself the 
equal of the West in the mastery of the contemporary Western technique; 
she must also be the champion of a faith that could contend on equal 
terms with a Modern Western Liberalism; and she must not be content 
simply to preserve in its pristine purity, within a Holy Russian citadel, 
the distinctive faith to which she was to dedicate herself; she must enter 
into active competition with the Western faith of Liberalism in that 
literally world-wide mission-field which the Modern West had created by 
knitting together the whole habitable and traversable surface of the 
Earth in a Western-manufactured net-work of communications and 
commerce. Russia must compete with the West for the spiritual allegiance 
of all the living societies that were neither Western nor Russian in their 
native cultural tradition, and—not content even with that—she must 
have the supreme audacity to carry the war into the enemy’s camp by 
preaching the Russian faith in the West’s own homeland. 

Granting the necessity of the strategy outlined in these general terms 
for a Russia who was bent on reasserting herself, the particular faith to 
which a spiritually militant Russia was to attempt to convert the World 
still remained to be found, and this was the point at which the ascendancy 
of the Modern Western culture in the contemporary world revealed its 
strength by driving the Russians into the paradoxical course on which, 
after Lenin’s death, the policy of the Soviet Union was set in conse¬ 
quence of Stalin’s victory over Trotsky. Stalin’s appropriation of the 
international flag of Marxism to serve as a new banner for Russian 
nationalism was a paradox because it was as illogical as it was statesman- 



THE MODERN WEST AND RUSSIA 135 

like. In logic the question was not an open one at all. The one faith that 
a militant Russia could logically pit against a Modern Western Liberal¬ 
ism was the traditional Russian version of Orthodox Christianity, since 
Russia’s claim to be the sole surviving repository of a perfect Christian 
Orthodoxy constituted her title to be ‘the Third Rome’ who was ‘the 
Heir of the Promise’. To throw over Orthodox Christianity was to throw 
away the credentials on which the whole of her pretension to uniqueness 
rested. Mated with any faith other than this traditional one—and, 
above all, when the substituted novel faith was a creed whose ‘chosen 
People’ was, not the Russian nation, but an international proletariat— 
the pretension was deprived of even that shadow of historical justification 
with which it was covered in the setting of its original associations. On 
the other hand the idea that Russia should attempt to compete for the 
spiritual allegiance of Mankind against a Modern Western Liberalism 
in the name of a traditional Orthodox Christianity had only to be 
formulated in order to put itself out of court by the glaring obviousness 
of its impracticability. Manifestly that cock would not fight in a twentieth- 
century oecumenical cockpit. By that date the World was already so far 
Westernized that the one hope of challenging the prevailing liberal 
Western ideological orthodoxy lay in pitting against it an ideological 
heresy that was likewise of Western origin; and for this militant Russian 
purpose the Marxian ideology was particularly well suited 1 in nvo ways. 

In the first place Marxism was a Western ‘futurist’ criticism of a 
latter-day industrial form of Modern Western life which the Western 
Romantic Movement had attacked from an ‘archaistic’ angle; 1 and a 
Wenticth-ccntury Russian Communist adaptation of this Western vein 
of Futurism promised to be a more effective move than a nineteenth- 
century Russian Slavophil adaptation of Romanticism had proved to be, 
since Futurism was intrinsically a more positive line of attack than 
Archaism was against an established dispensation. Marxism was thus a 
telling ideological weapon for a militant Russia to adopt for use on a 
world-wide spiritual arena; and, in the second place, it was likely to 
minister to Russia’s other purpose—which was a prior need—of holding 
her own against the West in the mastery of a Modern Western techno¬ 
logy; for Marxism exalted the economic factor in life above all others 
and would therefore be an apt instrument for serving its Russian users’ 
purpose in the domestic field, where their task was to drive a traditionally 
un-cconomic-minded Russian people into catching up with their 
Western contemporaries, by forced marches, in a technological race in 
which the Westerners had a long start and in which the stakes of the 
event were life and death. These practical arguments in favour of sub¬ 
stituting Marxism for Orthodox Christianity 1 as the faith to which 

« The Russians’ adoption of the Marxian Western heresy as their weapon for assailing 
the Western orthodoxy of the src may be compared with the Safawis’ adoption of Imimi 
Shi'ism as their weapon for assailing the Sunnism that was the orthodox version of 
Islam in the Iranic World of Shah Ismi'il's generation (see I. i. 359 -b 5 )> The choice of 
weapon was in both cases adroit without being cynical, because in both cases the motive 
was subconscious. 

* For Archaism and Futurism, see V. vi. 49-132. 

* This adoption of an alien atheistic and materialist philosophy as a psychological 
substitute for a native religion had a precedent in the hardly less strange transformation 


136 encounters between contemporaries 

Russia was to pin her pretension to be the heir to a unique destiny out¬ 
weighed the academic consideration that the pretension itself logically 
fell to the ground with the repudiation of its traditional religious founda¬ 
tion, while the flagrancy of this betrayal of tradition and logic at the 
dictation of raison d'ttat showed how near the Modern Western Civiliza¬ 
tion had already come to captivating the contemporary world, Russia 
included, by the time when the Russian Communists raised their horn. 

The Race between the West's Technological Advance and Russia's Techno¬ 
logical Westernization 

The practical choice between the three theoretically alternative 
Russian reactions to the aggression of the Modern West was not, of 
course, ever decided by an academic debate* in the style of the discussion 
of the respective merits of Democracy, Oligarchy, and Monarchy which 
Herodotus puts into the mouths of Darius and his fellow assassins in 
the political vacuum which they had created by their success in murder- 

3 Smcrdis. 2 The Russian choice was made, for the most part, un- 
ectivcly and unselfconsciously, from hand to mouth, in improvised 
responses to successive Western challenges in the crude form of aggres¬ 
sive military attacks, and, on this analysis, the encounter between 
Russia and the Modern West presented itself as a drama in which, down 
to the time of writing, one plot had been recurring in successive perform¬ 
ances. The initial event in this recurrent plot was a sensational Western 
military success at Russia’s expense which was patently accounted for 
by the West’s technological superiority at the time; the second event was 
an effort on Russia’s part to save her independence by mastering the 
technique of the West up to the contemporary level at which it had 
vindicated itself in Western hands so dangerously from Russia’s stand¬ 
point; the third event was a fresh ordeal by battle in which Russia 
demonstrated, by successfully repulsing another Western attack, that 
she had achieved her own latest technological objective; the fourth 
event was a sensational fresh advance in Western technology which rang 
up the curtain for a fresh performance of the drama by confronting 
Russia, all over again, with a problem which, in the outgoing act, she 
had solved ad hoc without (as now appeared) having succeeded in solving 
it permanently. 1 

In Russian history 4 the first performance of this repetitive drama was 

of a Primitive Buddhist philosophy into the Mahayana in the course of its passage from 
India to the Far East. 

1 The nearest approach to this was the Marxian theological warfare—in which texts 
from Marx’s, Engels’, and Lenin’s canonical works were hurled from both sides as missile 
weapons—that was an accompaniment of the struggle between Stalin and Trotsky, after 
Lenin's death, for control over the Soviet Government. 

2 See Herodotus, Book III, chaps. 80-83. 

J See Annex I, pp. 674-5, below. 

4 While the Russo-Western heat was the classical instance of a race between the 
Modem West’s technological advance and a contemporary non-Wcstem society’s 
technological Westernization, Russia was not the only non-Western society in this age 
that was goaded into running this race by a recurring threat from a perpetually advancing 
Western competitor. 

'The greatest danger to the independent strength and freedom of initiative of a nation 
like China (or Turkey) which is making an effort to adapt itself to the standards of the 
West is that it thereby admits, at least by implication, the superior authority of the 



THE MODERN WEST AND RUSSIA 137 
opened by the first establishment of contact between Russia and the 
Modem West at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of 
the Christian Era and was closed in 1812 by the victory of a Russia 
that had been Westernized by Peter the Great over a Napoleon who was 
the greatest Modern Western soldier up to date. 

At the beginning of this performance the Russians were hardly yet 
aware of the existence of ‘the Western Question’; and, on the strength 
of the political union of Novgorod with Muscovy, and of a casual adop¬ 
tion of a few military applications of the Modem Western technolog)' 
of the day, such as the use of fire-arms, Tsar Ivan IV rashly provoked 
his Western neighbours by attempting to win for his united Russia a 
broader frontage on the Baltic coast through the conquest of the inter¬ 
vening marches of the Western World. A facile initial success against the 
already disintegrating regime of the Teutonic Order in the Baltic 
Provinces brought Ivan into collision with Sweden and Lithuania, and 
the ensuing trial of strength demonstrated the West’s contemporary 
military superiority over Russia. So far from succeeding in extending 
Russia's frontage on the Baltic, Ivan found himself compelled to cede to 
Sweden even the strip of coastline at the head of the Gulf of Finland 
which the Muscovite Empire had inherited from the Republic of 
Novgorod; this discomfiture of Muscovy in the war of a.d. 1558-S3 was 
followed by the Polono-Lithuanian occupation of Moscow in a.d. 1610- 
12;' and, though, as between Russia and Poland-Lithuania, the eventual 
balance of territorial gains and losses in this round of warfare was in 
Russia’s favour, 2 it was not to her advantage in her account with 
Sweden, 1 while the true measure of the relative strengths of Russia and 
her Western adversaries was given, not by any fluctuations in frontiers, 
but by the constant ability of sixteenth-century and seventeenth-century 
Western armies to defeat contemporary Russian armies in the field. 

This alarming experience of the inadequacy of native Russian military 

West; with the result that, by the time it has mastered Westernization as a thing com¬ 
plete in itself, the West proper, whose Westernism is a living force informed with growth 
and activity, has progressed spontaneously to a further point—with the result that the 
nation striving for adaptation, having once admitted the authority of the alien standard, 
finds itself still chronologically in arrears and accordingly restricted in the faculty of 
initiative. Even in a nation like Japan, where the process of Westernizing was less an 
adaptation than a transformation, a genuine phenomenon of rebirth, the effects of this 
chronological handicap can very definitely be traced’ (Lattimore, Owen: Manchuria, 
Cradle of Conflict (New York 1931, Macmillan), pp. 154-5). 

1 See II. ii. 176. 

1 In A.D. 1654 the Ukrainian Cossacks (see II. ii. 154-7) transferred their nominal 
allegiance from Poland to Muscovy; in a.d. 1667 Muscovy acquired Smolensk and Kiev 
from Poland-Lithuania by the Peace Treaty of Andrusovo; in a.d. 1686 these territorial 
terms were confirmed in an ‘Eternal Peace' between the two Powers. 

> The terms of the Russo-Swedish peace treaty concluded at Stolbovo in a.d. 1617 
re-enacted those of the treaty of a.d. 1583 by reinstating Sweden in the possession of 
even the atrip of originally Russian coastline, at the head of the Gulf of Finland, which 
Russia had momentarily recovered from Sweden in the peace treaty concluded at 
Tyavzhin in A.D. IS95, so that Russia found herself once again completely barred out 
from access to the Baltic Sea. Even the distant English toyed, in a.d. 1612-13, with a 
project for the acquisition of at least the north of Russia by the British Crown which 
was submitted by a Scottish soldier. Captain Thomas Chamberlain, who had served 
in a force of West European mercenaries sent in a.d. 1609 by the Swedish Govern¬ 
ment to the Tsar Vasilii Shuisky (see Lubimenko, Inna: ‘A Project for the Acquisition 
of Russia by James I\ in The English Historical Review, vol. xxix (London 1914, Long¬ 
mans Green), pp. 246-56). 



138 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
technique in warfare with Russia’s Modern Western neighbours was a 
challenge which found its response in the Petrine ‘Herodian’ revolution. 1 
Peter the Great’s first objective was to Westernize Russia’s armed forces, 
on sea and land, up to the contemporary Western standard of efficiency; 
to achieve this, he had also to Westernize Russian technology and public 
administration; this in turn required provision for the higher education 
of experts and officials up to the Western standard of the day; and Peter, 
being a man of genius and vision, extended these minimum necessary 
measures to embrace a comprehensive Westernization of a diluted 
Muscovite nobility. 2 The success of this Petrine policy was foreshadowed 
by Peter’s own victory, in a.d. 1709, over a rash Swedish invader of the 
Ukraine, 3 and was demonstrated, eighty-seven years after Peter’s death, 
when, in a.d. 1812, the Petrine Russian Empire brought to the ground a 
French aggressor who had proved more than a match for all his Western 
continental adversaries during the preceding fifteen years, and who was 
invading Russia at the head of the united military forces of Continental 
Western Europe. 

The Napoleonic French Grand Army was a Western military instru¬ 
ment of a vastly higher calibre than the Polish expeditionary force which, 
two hundred years earlier, had anticipated the French in the fatal feat of 
momentarily occupying Moscow; and, after dividing with Great Britain 
the honours of overthrowing Napoleon, Petrine Russia emerged from 
this ordeal as the leading continental Power and pushed her western 
continental frontiers so far westward as to include within them the 
native Western province of ‘Congress Poland’. The post-Napoleonic 
era saw a superficially Westernized Russia standing on a pinnacle of 
apparent ascendancy; yet this appearance was already an illusion; for 
the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars of a.d. 1793-1815 were the last 
Western wars on the grand scale that were fought with the pre-industrial 
Western technique. By a.d. 1812 the Industrial Revolution was already 
in full swing in England; and, though, in the Crimean War (gerebatur 
a.d. 1853-6), Russia was still able to fight her Western adversaries on 
more or less equal technological terms thanks to the conservatism of 
contemporary French and British professional military minds, in the 
seventh decade of the nineteenth century the American Civil War 
(gerebatur a.d. 1861-5) and a Bismarckian Prussia’s three wars of aggres¬ 
sion (gerebantur a.d. 1864, *866, 1870-1) saw the new industrial tech¬ 
nique at last duly applied to warfare by Western Powers; 4 and in the 
nineteenth century, as in the sixteenth century, Russia was caught nap¬ 
ping by a sudden sensational advance in her Western neighbours’ 
military technique. 

1 A summary of Peter the Great’s work has been given in III. iii. 278-83. 

* See VI. vii. 358, 360, and 361. 

i Peter’s decisive victory over Charles XII in a.d. 1709 at Poltava, which had been 
preceded by the conquest of Ingermanland, Narva, and Dorpat in a.d. 1701-4, was 
followed in A.D. 1710 by the conquest of Karelia, Estland, Livland, and Riga. Peter’s 
recognition that, in acquiring for Muscovy this frontage on the Baltic Sea, he had 
achieved for her in his twenty-onc-ycars-long war (gerebatur a.d. 1700-21) what Ivan IV 
had been seeking to achieve for her in his twenty-six-ycars-long war (gerebatur a.d. 
1558-83) was expressed in the pageantrv of his triumphal entry into Moscow after 
the conclusion of peace in a.d. 1721 (see Sumner, Peter the Great and the Emergence of 
Russia, p. 202). . « See IV. iv. 151-2. 



THE MODERN WEST AND RUSSIA 139 

Once again, Russia rather casually adopted a few elements of the new 
Western technical apparatus. In employing, for example, the device of 
conquering a desert by building a railway, the Russians in Transcaspia 1 
were ahead of the British in the Sudan; but, when, in the Russo- 
Japanese War of a.d. 1904-5, a still no more than Petrine Russia pitted 
her eighteenth-century Western armaments against the nineteenth- 
century western armaments of a Post-Tokugawan Japan, she proved to 
be a colossus with feet of clay; and, when, undeterred by this warning, 
she ventured, ten years later, to measure her strength against Germany's 
in the General War of a.d. 1914-18, the colossus collapsed. This shatter¬ 
ing experience of the inadequacy of the Petrine dispensation for enabling 
Russia to hold her own in an industrialized world was the challenge to 
which the Communist Marxian revolution was the response. The 
Petrine regime had been all but overwhelmed by the abortive revolution 
of a.d. 1905, which had been the Russian people's reaction to the Petrine 
Russian Empire’s defeat by Japan. The utter disaster of a.d. 1914-18, 
and its remorseless revelation of the extreme industrial backwardness 
which had made it inevitable, brought the Bolsheviks into power and at 
the same time determined their programme. 

This programme was presented by Stalin in uncompromisingly 
drastic language in a speech on the tasks of business executives delivered 
at the First All-Union Conference of Managers of Socialist Industry on 
the 4th February, 1931, 2 in the early days of his inter-war drive to 
raise the technological efficiency of the Soviet Union to a new level. 

‘The main thing is to have the passionate Bolshevik desire to master 
technique, to master the science of production ... It is sometimes asked 
whether it is not possible to slow down the tempo a bit... No! ... On 
the contrary, we must increase it as much as is within our powers and 
possibilities. ... To slacken the tempo would mean falling behind; and 
those who fall behind get beaten....’ 

The imperative necessity for these superhuman exertions which he 
was demanding of the people of the Soviet Union was driven home in 
Stalin’s next words in this speech by an appeal to the lessons of Russian 
history. 

‘One feature of the history of old Russia was the continual beating she 
suffered for falling behind, for her backwardness. She was beaten by the 
Mongol khans. She was beaten by the Turkish beys. She was beaten by 
the Swedish feudal lords. She was beaten by the Polish and Lithuanian 
gentry. She was beaten by the British and French capitalists. She was 
beaten by the Japanese barons. All beat her—for her backwardness: for 
military backwardness, for cultural backwardness, for political backward¬ 
ness, for industrial backwardness, for agricultural backwardness. She was 
beaten because to do so was profitable and could be done with impunity.... 

‘Do you want our socialist fatherland to be beaten and to lose its in¬ 
dependence? If you do not want this, you must put an end to its back¬ 
wardness in the shortest possible time and develop genuine Bolshevik 
tempo in building up its socialist system of economy .... We are fifty or a 

* See V. v. 323. n. 3, and d. 30, above. 

1 English text in Stalin, Joseph: Leninism (London 1940, Allen and Unwin), pp. 
359-67- 



i 4 o ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
hundred years behind the advanced countries. We must make good this 
distance in ten years. Either we do it, or they crush us.’ 

On the 4th May, 1935, when the urgency of Stalin’s technological 
programme had been pointed by Hitler’s advent to power in Germany 
and by his overt rearmament of the Third Reich, Stalin drove his 
argument home in an address delivered in the Kremlin to the graduates 
from the Red Army academies. 1 

‘We inherited from the past a technically backward, impoverished, and 
ruined country. Ruined by four years of imperialist war, and ruined again 
by three years of civil war, a country with a semi-literate population, with 
a low technical level, with isolated industrial oases lost in a sea ot dwart 
peasant farms—such was the country we inherited from the past. I he 
task was to transfer this country from mediaeval darkness to modern 
industry and mechanised agriculture. ... The question that confronted 
us was: Either we solve this problem in the shortest possible time, and 
consolidate Socialism in our country - , or we do not solve it, in w - hich case 
our country—weak technically and unenlightened in the cultural sense- 
will lose its independence and become a stake in the game of the imperial¬ 
ist powers.’ 

The dose of Westernization that was administered to Russia by the 
Bolsheviks differed from Peter’s dose in its application. The provinces 
of Russian life which it affected were a smaller part of the total field; for, 
whereas Peter had set out to Westernize almost everything in the life of a 
diluted and expanded Muscovite nobility, the Bolsheviks rigidly con¬ 
fined their attentions to the province of technology, where they started 
an intensive course of industrialization, and the province of ideology, in 
which they sought to substitute a Marxian for a Christian orthodoxy. 
Yet, if they did not range as widely as Peter over the surface of Russian 
life, they made up for this by digging down far deeper below the surface 
within the limited area to which they restricted their operations; and in 
this difference in their Westernizing tactics they were faithfully reflecting 
a change which had overtaken Western life itself, between Peter the 
Great’s generation and theirs, as a result of the eruption of the two 
elemental forces of Industrialism and Democracy. 2 

The drive imparted by these forces had made mass-action a condition 
of efficiency; and this portentous new ‘totalitarianism’, which was as 
foreign to the bourgeois as it had been to the aristocratic native Western 
tradition, was accepted wholeheartedly, and imposed without qualms, 
by Russian Communists whose assumption of a Marxian heretical 
Western costume could not erase from their Russian hearts and minds 
the impress of deeply ingrained Orthodox Christian political habits, 
however vehemently their Marxian wills might have repudiated the 
Orthodox Christian tradition. As heirs, malgrS eux, of an Orthodox 
Christian cultural heritage, they could not find the principle of ‘totali¬ 
tarianism’ either unfamiliar or shocking; for, in evoking a ghost of the 
Roman Empire and subjecting the Orthodox Church to this resuscitated 
Hellenic universal state, the main body of the Orthodox Christian Society 

» English text in Sulin, op. cit., pp. 54 ®-S- 1 S «« 1V - iv - » 4 «“ 8 s- 



THE MODERN WEST AND RUSSIA 141 
had forged a despotic institution of high potency;' and in the Russian 
offshoot of Orthodox Christendom a comparable engine of despotism— 
‘heavy as frost and deep almost as life’ 2 —had been constructed, since 
the fourteenth century of the Christian Era, in Muscovy and her succes¬ 
sor the Petrine Russian Empire—a Russian state of which the Soviet 
Union was the heir. J 

The second bout in the dramatic encounter between Russia and the 
Modern West accomplished its repetition of the plot of the play within 
a much shorter span of time than the first bout had taken to illustrate 
the same motif. An interval of no less than two centuries had separated 
the Polish military occupation of Moscow in a.d. 1610-12, which had 
been the ultimate stimulus of the Petrine Revolution, from the defeat of 
Napoleon in a.d. 1812 which had been its final vindication, while there 
was an interval of no more than thirty years between the German victory 
over a Petrine Russia in a.d. 19x5, which was the genesis of the Soviet 
regime, and the Soviet Union’s victory over Germany in a.d. 1945, by 
which the Communist Revolution was vindicated in its generation. 

This acceleration—which was perhaps to be explained as one of the 
effects of a Western process of mechanization on the life of a Westerniz¬ 
ing World—was as evident in the sequel to the second performance of 
the Russo-Western tragedy as it was in this second performance’s con¬ 
summation. After her triumph in a.d. 1812 the Petrine Russian Empire 
had at any rate enjoyed half a century free from care before it had become 
apparent that the Western World had for the second time stolen a march 
on Russia by making an advance in technology that had once again 
revolutionized the art of war. In a.d. 1945, the duration of the Soviet 
Government’s rest-cure in a fool’s paradise was limited, by a rocket- 
swift Zeitgeist, to a period of ninety' days. Germany had capitulated on 
the 8th May, 1945; on the 6th August of the same year the first atomic 
bomb was dropped by the Americans on Japan; and, from that latter 
date onwards till the time of writing, Russia was again in the presence 
of the same problem that had confronted her after the disaster of a.d. 
1915 and the disaster of a.d. 1610-12. In the never-ending technological 
race between Russia and her Western sister, the West had again forged 
ahead of Russia so far as to leave her militarily at the mercy of her 
Western contemporaries unless and until she could catch up again with 
her formidable competitors for the third time, as she had succeeded in 
catching up with them twice before. 


The Soviet Union's Encounter with the United States 


While this technico-military issue was still on the knees of the Gods, 
it was already apparent on the political plane that, if the empire which 
the Grand Duke Ivan III of Muscovy had brought into being by annex¬ 
ing Novgorod to his dominions in the eighth decade of the fifteenth 
century was to be diagnosed as a Russian universal state, this polity had 
been kept alive beyond its natural expectation of life by the galvanic 
effect of the impact of the Modern West, as an expiring ‘Middle 


« See IV. iv. 3 20-408 and X. ix. 15. 

1 Wordiworth: Ode on Intimations of Immortality. 


J See pp. 676-8, below. 



142 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
Empire’ of Egypt had been reanimated by the impact of the Hyksos, and 
an expiring 'New Empire’ by the impact of ‘the Sea Peoples’. 

On the analogy of the histories of universal states which had run their 
course without this being appreciably affected by the play of external 
forces, the Muscovite Russian Empire might have been expected to have 
lapsed into anarchy, achieved a recovery, and eventually collapsed 
irretrievably about four hundred years from the date of its original 
establishment; and symptoms of all these three characteristic experi¬ 
ences in a universal state’s normal history duly present themselves in 
this Russian case. The temporary lapse into anarchy is represented by 
the rough passage which the Russians themselves had named ‘the Time 
of Troubles’ ( instabat a.d. 1604-12)-, 1 the recover}' by the rally under 
the new regime of the Romanov Dynasty; 2 and the eventual collapse by 
the adversity into which the Romanov Empire fell in the course of the 
thirty-six years beginning with the assassination of Tsar Alexander II 
in a . d . 1881 and ending with the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II in a . d . 
1917.* If the tragedy had played itself out to the end in conformity with 
the conventional plot, this last act would have seen the empire that had 
been founded by Ivan III and been enlarged by his successors fall to 
pieces into a number of parochial successor-states of barbarian or 
indigenous origin; and, after the Bolshevik Revolution of a.d. 1917, 
there were symptoms of this characteristic denouement likewise. At 
this stage, however, the tendency for events to take their typical course 
was overborne by a more powerful current making for the rehabilitation 
of the foundered universal state in a new shape. 

Between a.d. 1917 and a.d. 1922 4 all the momentarily dislocated frag¬ 
ments of the former Russian Empire, except a splinter of Transcaucasia 5 
and a belt of border territories on the Empire’s western fringe, whose 
populations were Westerners in their culture, were reintegrated under 
the rule of a single indigenous successor-state which assumed, on the 
30th December, 1922, the title of a ‘Union of Soviet Socialist Republics’; 
and thereafter, as a result of the outcome of the General War of a.d. 
1 939 “ 45 > the Soviet Union not only recovered the lost western dominions 
of the Romanov Empire but imposed its political ascendancy over Con¬ 
tinental European territories still farther to the west, up to a line which 
the Romanov Empire had never approached—not even at the zenith of 
its military and political power in a.d. 1814-15. 6 

« See I. i. S 3 , n. 2; II. ii. 157 and 176; IV. iv. 90 and 91-92; V. v. 311, n. 2; V. vi. 
19s, n. 2, and 311. 

1 Sec V. vi. 212. > See V. vi. 311, n. 3. 

* On the 14th November, 1922, the reunification of the non-Wcstem territories form¬ 
erly embraced in the Russian Empire was completed by the merger of the Far Eastern 
Republic in the Socialist Federal Soviet Republic of Great Russia. 

l Consisting of the districts of Qars and Ardahan and a portion of the district of 
Batum (excluding the port ar.d town of Batum itself), which had been definitively retro¬ 
ceded to Turkey in a.d. 1921. 

6 In A.D. 1945 «he western frontier of the Soviet Union itself still embraced less terri¬ 
tory inhabited by Westerners than had been included within the western frontier of the 
Romanov Empire in A.D. 1914; for, while the Soviet Union had now reannexed to 
Russia the three inter-war republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, Soviet Lithuania 
overlapped with no more than the north-eastern comer of the former Romanov dominion 
of ‘Congress Poland’, and only a fraction of the former Romanov dominion of Finland 
—the Karelian Isthmus—had been reannexed from the inter-war Finnish Republic. On 



THE MODERN WEST AND RUSSIA 143 

This Phocnix-like resurrection of a Romanov Empire in the shape of 
the Soviet Union with its glacis of satellite states was the response of an 
obstinately persisting Russian will to independence in face of a menace 
of extinction which had never been more acute than when, on the 
morrow of the General War of a.d. 1914-18, a prostrate Russia’s 
recent Western or Westernized allies—France, Great Britain, the 
United States, and Japan—had followed suit to her recent Western 
adversary Germany in invading her by force of arms in military opera¬ 
tions which, in Russian eyes, were not acquitted of being aggressive in 
virtue of their being professedly undertaken with the object of putting 
back a non-Communist Russian regime into the saddle. The cumulative 
effect of the German military invasion of Russia in and after a.d. 1915, 
the inter-ally military invasion of Russia in and after a.d. 1918, and the 
renewed German military invasion of Russia in and after a.d. 1940 had 
been to conjure back into being a Russian polity which was not merely 
an unseasonable avatar of a time-expired Russian universal state but 
was one of two super-great Powers in a Westernizing World, now co¬ 
extensive with the whole surface of the planet, in whose political 
articulation the number of Powers of the highest calibre had been re¬ 
duced to two from eight in the course of thirty-one years (a.d 1914-45) 
as a result of two world wars in one life-time. 

What were to be the Soviet Union’s role and fate in the next chapter 
of the history of Russia’s encounter with the West ? The geographical 
configuration of human affairs on the morrow of the World War of a.d. 
1939-45 might appear to portend the approach of a climax in the history, 
not only of the Russian and the Western civilizations, but of a species of 
society—Civilization itself—which, by that date, had been in existence 
for some five or six thousand years and whose living representatives 
were civilizations of the third generation. 

The Soviet Union and the United States, whose gigantic forms now, 
between them, overshadowed the political landscape, and whose rival 
championship of two competing ideologies was gathering the whole of 
Mankind into two opposing spiritual camps, displayed a resemblance to 
one another which was not confined to the external point of their com¬ 
mon pre-eminence over all their contemporaries in their order of material 
magnitude; they also possessed in common the more intimate feature of 
being planted, both alike, on culturally new ground, and of experiencing 
the stimulus which the conquest of new ground is apt to bring with it. 1 

the other hand the Soviet Union had compensated itself for its comparative moderation 
in rcannexing populations of Western culture by establishing its political ascend¬ 
ancy over a team of satellite Western states whose territories covered, between them, 
not only the unannexed major part of Finland, but the whole of Continental Eastern 
Europe between the new western frontier of the Soviet Union and a line running 
approximately south and north from the northern flank of the Austrian Alps to the 
southern shore of the Baltic Sea. Within this area, in a.d. 1952, the Soviet Union was 
effectively dominant over a post-war Poland covering the whole area in which a majority 
of the population was Polish in nationality, sa well as a strip of formerly German- 
inhabited territory between the Polish-inhabited area and the Oder-Neisse line; over a 
zone of Germany, west of the Oder, surrounding Berlin; over a zone of Austria, surround¬ 
ing Vienna; and over Czechoslovakia and Hungary, besides Rumania, Bulgaria, and 
Albania. At that date it remained to be seen whether the Soviet Union would succeed 
in reasserting ita ascendancy over a dissident Communist Jugoslavia and in bringing a 
compliant Communist regime into power in Greece. 1 See II. ii. 73-100. 



144 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

The territory of the United States had been culturally virgin soil, save 
for a fringe of the Mexic Civilization’s former cultural domain in the 
upper basin of the Rio Grande, before trans-oceanic colonists from 
Western Europe had begun to take possession of it in the seventeenth 
century of the Christian Era; and the territory of the Soviet Union and 
its satellites' was comparatively new ground likewise. Apart from the 
Oxus-Jaxartes Basin and Transcaucasia, hardly any of it had ever been 
occupied by any sedentary civilization before the turn of the tenth and 
eleventh centuries of the Christian Era; the Russian occupation of the 
Donetz, Don, Lower Volga, Urals, and Siberia had not begun till the 
sixteenth century of the Christian Era, when Muscovy had embarked on 
an eastward and south-eastward expansion overland that was not in¬ 
comparable in scale with the contemporary expansion of the maritime 
peoples of Western Europe overseas; and, as one consequence of the 
intensive industrialization of the Soviet Union, the centre of gravity of 
its economic life had latterly been shifting more and more out of the 
original homeland of the Russian Civilization in the North-East 
European forests into these recently occupied territories which had been 
Nomad’s land or Primitive Man’s preserve before Russian enterprise 
had opened them up as fresh fields for the cultivation of a different way 
of life. 

While the Soviet Union and the United States were both thus laid 
out on recently virgin soil, they confronted one another across a belt of 
territories embracing all the rest of the domains, in the Old World, of all 
the living civilizations of Old-World origin and the entire domains of 
all these living civilizations’ predecessors of earlier generations. This 
political and ideological no-man’s-land enveloped the Old World’s 
Soviet heartland like an immense crescent-shaped festoon with its 
extremities in the high latitudes of Northern Japan and Scandinavia 
and with its bow sagging down below the Equator in Indonesia. 2 This 
zone contained the Japanese offshoot and the Chinese main body of the 
Far Eastern Civilization; the Tantric Mahayanian fossils of the extinct 
Indie Civilization in Mongolia and Tibet; the Hinayanian fossils of the 
same extinct civilization in Cambodia, Siam, Burma, and Ceylon; the 
Hindu Civilization; the Islamic Civilization from its eastern outposts 
in the Southern Philippines and Western China to its western outposts 
on the Atlantic coast of Africa; the main body of Orthodox Christendom 
in South-Eastern Europe; and the European homeland of the Western 
Civilization. 

Each of the mansions occupied by these divers bodies social had a 
continental back door accessible from the Soviet heartland of the Old 
World and a maritime front door accessible from the Americas across 
the Ocean. They were thus all open to simultaneous and competitive 
penetration by the two colossi that were bestriding a post-Hitlerian 
World; and, impotent though their tenants were to hold their own, 
should occasion arise, against either of their two gigantic neighbours, 
their existence was nevertheless the key to the balance of political power, 
since this balance could hardly fail to incline decisively in favour of the 

1 Sec xi, map. 49. * See XII. ix. 488-9, and xi, map 65. 




THE MODERN WEST AND RUSSIA 145 

giant, whichever of the two it might be, who should succeed in drawing 
into his own camp a majority of these denizens of an intervening 
no-man’s-land whose bodies were to be the prizes of a political and ideo¬ 
logical tug-o’-war. 

On the precedent of comparable conjunctures in the histories of other 
civilizations, this political situation in a Westernizing World on the 
morrow of a Second World War might be read to mean that the Western 
Civilization had now arrived at a stage in a losing battle against disinte¬ 
gration at which it was on the eve of entering into a universal state, and 
that a third world war was the crushingly heavy price that Destiny was 
going to exact for the barren opportunity of achieving this abortive 
rally. 1 Whatever may have been the current expectations of the rulers 
of the Soviet Union and their subjects, there were certainly many people 
in the Western World at this time who were fatalistically foreboding a 
third world war in which the United States and the Soviet Union would 
be the respective principals, and from which a literally world-wide 
universal state would arise through the elimination, vi et armis , of one 
or other of these two remaining Great Powers. If that was in truth Man¬ 
kind’s unescapable destiny, this would mean that the Bolsheviks had 
achieved their tour de force of resuscitating the Russian Empire at the 
cost of condemning it to hazard its existence on a venture that must 
issue in either world power or downfall. As a result of a third world 
war, should this calamity overtake Mankind, it would seem that the 
Soviet Union must either win the invidiously brilliant distinction of 
providing a reluctant Western World with an alien universal state such 
as the ‘Osmanlis had imposed on the main body of Orthodox Christen¬ 
dom, and the Mughals and their British successors on the Hindu World, 
or alternatively suffer a disaster that would undo the work of Stalin and 
Lenin and Peter and Ivan III alike by pulverizing this vast body politic 
into fragments smaller than the fifteenth-century Grand Duchy of 
Moscow and Republic of Novgorod whose union had been the Russian 
Empire’s genesis. 

Was one or other of these extreme alternative denouements inevitable ? 
At the time of writing, it would have been wilful blindness to ignore the 
signs pointing to a third world war as the line of least resistance for a 
world whose ability to be master of its own destiny was manifestly at 
this time an open question. At the same time it would have been wanton 
‘defeatism’ to discount other, perhaps not less convincing, signs of the 
times which suggested that a shatteringly Wagnerian overture might 
resolve itself into a prosaically Benthamite anticlimax. 

While it was certain, in the minds of Western observers, that the 
Americans’ sense of destiny would never tempt them to take the initia¬ 
tive in going to war with the Soviet Union, there was no warrant for 
assuming, on the other hand, that the Russians’ sense of destiny would 
betray the inveterately cautious and deliberate Muscovite political 
chess-players into rushing in where their impulsive American opponents 
feared to tread. Even if the Soviet Government were one day to convince 
itself that, in a perpetually recurring race for the goal of technological 
' These prospects are discussed in XII. ix. 524-36- 


I 4 6 encounters between contemporaries 

efficiency, it had caught up with the United States, as it had once suc¬ 
ceeded in catching up with Germany, this reassuring conviction would 
not necessarily move the Russians to take the offensive. An offensive 
war against an encompassing world of hostile infidels was not com¬ 
mended either by Soviet mythology or by Russian experience. Marxism 
had appropriated the Jewish myth of an inoffensive Chosen People 
which, in a war that it has never sought, is to win a miraculous victory 
against overwhelming odds over a coalition of enemies who have brought 
their doom upon themselves by banding together in the pride of their 
hearts to make an unprovoked assault on Zion. 1 The Russian people had 
thrice experienced the exultation of snatching victory out of defeat in 
fighting on their own ground against apparently irresistible Western 
invaders of Holy Russia, while they had also more than once experi¬ 
enced the humiliation of being checked, or defeated outright, on foreign 
soil by opponents who were not the Russians’ match in numbers or 
resources—as they had been checked by the Turks in Rumelia in the 
Russo-Turkish War of a.d. 1877-8, 2 and defeated by the Japanese in 
Manchuria in the Russo-Japanese War of a.d. 1904-5. These considera¬ 
tions suggested that the twentieth-century tension between the Soviet 
Union and the United States was not bound to result in war in the 
nineteen-fifties, but might alternatively relax without catastrophe, as 
the nineteenth-century tension between the Russian Empire and the 
British Empire had relaxed in the eighteen-eighties. 

If this unapocalyptic denouement were in fact to come to pass, the 
Russian Empire founded by Ivan III and resuscitated by Lenin might 
be expected to survive at a mezzanine altitude of political eminence. 
This messianic ‘Third Rome’ would then find her level as a polity of far 
lower stature than the alien universal state of a forcibly united Western 
World which she would have had to become if she was to have escaped 
destruction in the event of a third world war; but on the other hand she 
would then stand out head and shoulders above the ordinary parochial 
states of a politically still divided Western World, instead of joining their 
ranks in the modest role of an undistinguished recruit for which Mus¬ 
covy had been cast by Peter the Great, and into which the Soviet Union 
had appeared to be lapsing in the nineteen-thirties. 3 In a Westernizing 
World, in which other kingdoms and lands, outside the frontiers of the 
Soviet Union herself and her involuntary satellites, had found security 
against their fear of Soviet attack and Communist penetration by volun¬ 
tarily entering into a free political association with the United States and 
with one another to the extent required for effective common defence 
and common pursuit of material and spiritual welfare, the Soviet Union 
might be expected to play something like the role which the Parthian 
and Kushan Powers had played in the Transeuphratean continental 
hinterland of a Hellenizing World 4 when a ring of maritime countries 
encircling the Mediterranean had been gathered together under the aegis 
of Rome in a Pax Augusta .* 

1 For the Marxist version of this apocalyptic Jewish myth, see V. v. 183. 

* See XII. ix. 512-13. * See V. v. 183-8. * See XII. ix. 528-9. 

5 For the role of the Mediterranean in the human geography of the Roman Empire, 
see VI. vii. 81, ns. X, 2, 3, and 4, and X. ix. 657-62. 



THE MODERN WEST AND RUSSIA 147 

The Modem Western Civilization, like the Hellenic, had started life 
as a maritime society and had expanded by seamanship before laying 
iron rails on land; and, in an age when a world that had thus been 
Westernized through the conductive medium of the high seas was 
crystallizing politically round the ocean-girt island of North America, it 
was hardly to be expected that this process would extend very far be¬ 
yond the maritime fringes of the Old World into its land-locked heart¬ 
land, any more than it was to be expected that a land power centred on 
Moscow would ever be able to establish its dominion over the isles of the 
sea. These geographical considerations suggested that, if the habitable 
and traversable surface of the planet were to be unequally divided 
between the whale and the bear in proportions that would leave to the 
bear an inalienable residue of intractably continental territory, the two 
monsters might settle down side by side to live and let live; and, in an 
age of low political and high technological tension, such as this common- 
sense division of the World might be expected to inaugurate, it could be 
forecast that the practical compromises between free enterprise and 
regimentation covered by the rival ideological labels ‘Liberalism* and 
‘Communism’ would gradually become less unlike one another de 
facto , 1 as the rulers of Moscow began to be less tyrannically obsessed 
by fear, while the Western peoples continued to purchase further instal¬ 
ments of technological efficiency 2 and social justice at the inevitable cost 
of further self-imposed restrictions on the freedom of individuals to take 
undue advantage of their neighbours. 

In this unsensationally happy event the historical role of the Com¬ 
munist ideology and the Soviet Union might prove in retrospect, from a 
Western standpoint, to have been that of the Mephistophelian spirit 

Die stets das B6se will und stets das Gute schafft. 1 

An abortive Russian challenge to the captivation of the World by a 
secularized Modern Western Civilization might turn out to have re¬ 
dounded to the benefit of the vast depressed proletarian majority of 
Mankind—the proletarian civilizations and the proletarian lower orders 
in a Westernizing World whose Western makers and managers had 
once reigned, as oecumenical ‘lords of creation’, over a host of ‘Natives’ 4 
and ‘Poor Whites’ amounting to an overwhelming majority of the 
living generation of Mankind. 

In the economically unified but morally still divided world of the 
nineteenth century of the Christian Era, the primitive peasantry of 
Eastern Europe, Russia, Japan, China, Indo-China, Indonesia, India, 
South-West Asia, Egypt, Tropical Africa, and Latin America,* and even 
the urban industrial 'working class’ in North America and Western 
Europe, were living, on the material plane, on a level shockingly far 
below the contemporary level of the North American and West European 
bourgeoisie; and this evil of provocative inequality between sectional 

' On this point, see V. v. 188. . ... 

* Mechanization exacts its price in regimentation, as has been noticed in III. iu. 
20Q-12. See further XII. ix. 563-77-. 

) Goethe: Faust, II. 1335-6. quoted in II. i. 282. 

♦ See I. i. 151-3. 1 Sec Annex I, pp. 684-90, below. 



I 4 8 encounters between contemporaries 

classes, like the twin evil of discord between parochial states, had been 
a malady by which Civilization had been afflicted since the first emerg¬ 
ence of this species of society. Hitherto, Civilization’s marvellous material 
and spiritual fruits had been branded with the mark of Cain; for hitherto 
they had been the monopoly of a privileged minority whose exclusive 
enjoyment of them was a practical repudiation of the human social 
creature’s inalienable obligation to be his brother’s keeper. The obliga¬ 
tion was inalienable because sub-Man had succeeded in becoming 
human only in virtue of having become a social animal first, 1 and this 
sociality was so essential an element in Human Life that the energy and 
genius of even the most active and most gifted individual human being 
would always have remained barren if it had not been brought to harvest 
by the co-operative labours of the strong man’s weaker brethren. 

A privileged minority’s refusal to recognise this elemental truth and 
act upon it had been one cause of the breakdowns and disintegrations of 
civilizations in the course of the first five or six thousand years in the 
history of societies of this species; but, in a world that had been unified 
by the technological prowess of a civilization of the third generation, ‘the 
cornucopia of the engineer’, ‘shaken over all the Earth’ and ‘scattering 
everywhere an endowment of previously unpossessed and unimagined 
capacities and powers’,* had estopped the privileged minority’s tradi¬ 
tional plea that the fruits of Civilization, if they were to be enjoyed at 
all, must be the monopoly of a small fraction of Mankind because the 
productive powers of Civilization were unequal to the task of producing 
enough of these luxuries for distribution to all. By the middle of the 
twentieth century of the Christian Era an Industrial Revolution that, 
by this date, had been gathering momentum for more than 150 years 
had brought within sight a prospect of distributing the fruits of Civiliza¬ 
tion far more widely, at any rate, than had ever been imagined in the 
most utopian dreams in the past—however severely it might tax Nature’s 
resources and Man’s resourcefulness if Mankind were to set itself the 
task of raising the Asiatic coolie’s material standard of living to the level 
already attained by a West European working class, not to speak of a 
North American bourgeoisie. Short of attempting forthwith to fulfil 
such counsels of perfection, there was manifestly a huge interim pay¬ 
ment on account of social justice which a privileged minority already had 
it in its power to make, if it also had the will; and this was the gravamen 
of a Marxian indictment of ‘Capitalism’ which had been taken as the text 
for a Russian denunciation of a secularized Modern Western way of life. 

In thus denouncing the children of a Modern Western ‘ascendancy’ 
for their failure to pay a moral debt up to the progressively expanding 
limits of their capacity to discharge it, Communism was proclaiming in 
a challengingly loud un-Christian voice a commandment of Christ’s 
which, on the Christian Church’s lips, had sunk to a discreetly in¬ 
audible whisper repeated by churchmen under their breath; and, if 
Marxism was nevertheless a heresy from a truly Christian point of view, 
this was because, like most other heresies in their day, it had taken up 
arms on behalf of one grievously neglected Christian truth to the still 

* See I. i. 173. * Sir Alfred Ewing, quoted in III. iii. 2ix. 



THE MODERN WEST AND RUSSIA i 49 
more grievous neglect of this one Christian truth’s Christian setting. 
Through the militancy and the animus of its ideological offensive, 
Communism had deprived itself of any prospect of reconverting a 
privileged minority in the Western World to the social gospel of Christ¬ 
ianity in an anti-Christian dress; but, in the act of thus spiking its own 
guns, it had reopened for Christianity a prospect of reconverting ex- 
Christian Western souls to the Christian gospel in its integrity, including 
its social implications. In ‘the cold war’ which seemed likely to settle the 
World's fate in the current chapter of the World’s history, the decisive 
weight in the scales would be the sufferings of the vast ‘under-privileged’ 1 
majority of the living generation of Mankind, and this multitude of 
suffering human beings might be expected to throw in its lot with 
whichever of the two Powers that were now competing for its allegiance 
gave practical proof that it was carrying out the social gospel of Christ¬ 
ianity de facto. 

In these circumstances, self-interest would counsel a privileged 
minority among a dominant Western fraction of Mankind to discard 
the drill-sergeant’s rod and take up Orpheus’ lyre. 2 This change of 
external insignia, however, would be morally sterile so long as the motive 
for it was one of policy alone; for the Thracian wizard’s instrument 
cannot exert its magic charm unless its music is a genuine expression of 
the feelings in the player’s heart. To achieve its purpose, a calculated 
policy of philanthropy would have to be caught up and carried away by 
a spontaneous outburst of love; and, if the grace of God were to bring 
about this miracle in ex-Christian Western hearts genuinely smitten 
with contrition, and not merely with a self-interested alarm, by the 
hammer strokes of a Communist challenge, then an encounter between 
the Modern Western World and Russia, which had already changed the 
course of Russian history by prolonging the life-span of a time-expired 
Russian universal state, might also change the course of Modern 
Western history by rejuvenating a body social in which the familiar 
symptoms of disintegration had already made their appearance. If this 
encounter were to have this outcome, this might prove to be the opening 
of a wholly new chapter in the history’ of Mankind. 

1 ThU term ‘under-privileged’ was current in an American middle-class vocabulary 
at this time as a euphemistic substitute for the stark word ‘unprivileged’. In American 
mouths ‘under-privileged’ was a less unpalatable term, because it suggested that the 
difference of level was not very- great; that its elimination was already on the agenda; 
and that ‘privilege’ itself was, not an abuse which ought to be abolished, but an objective 
which could and should be attained by Everyman. ‘Under-privileged’ was, however, 
a flagrantly illogical term, considering that the conferment ofa favoured minority’s privi¬ 
leges on member* of a depressed class must still leave a residual depressed majority on 
an implicitly unacceptable lower level or, alternatively, must abolish ‘privilege’ itself 
if the whole, or even only a majority, of this hitherto depressed majority were to be 
brought up to a hitherto privileged minority’s standard. A ‘privilege’ that is shared by 
everybody, or even only by a majority, is a tontradiclio in adjreto, and a psychologist 
would perhaps have deduced from this revealingly illogical American euphemism the 
existence of an unresolved conflict in the souls of middle-class Americans between a 
natural human desire to retain the relatively high standard of living which they were now 
enjoying as members of an invidiously privileged minority and a conscience which must 
reproach itself so long as this stigma of privilege was associated with a standard which, 
in bourgeois American eyes, was justifiable for middle-class Americans in virtue of its 
being a natural and normal human right that, by implication, must be Everyman’s due. 

2 Sec IV. iv. 123-4 13*- 



150 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

2. The Modern West and the Main Body of Orthodox Christendom 

The difference between the Ottoman Orthodox Christian and the Muscovite 
Reaction to the West 

The reception of the Modern Western culture in the main body of 
Orthodox Christendom was coeval with its reception in Russia. In both 
these Orthodox Christian bodies social, this Westernizing movement 
set in towards the close of the seventeenth century of the Christian Era. 
In both cases the movement was a sharp and sudden revulsion from a 
long-sustained and apparently hard-set attitude of hostility towards a 
Western World and Western way of life which Orthodox Christians 
had learnt to detest through a previous experience of the West in 
an encounter with it in the medieval chapter of its history; and, in 
both cases again, one cause of this seventeenth-century psychological 
revolution in Orthodox Christian souls was a no less sharp and sudden 
antecedent psychological change in the West itself-—the inversion of an 
intolerant religious fanaticism into a cynical irreligious tolerance which 
reflected a profound disillusionment in Western souls w’ith the inconclu¬ 
sive political and devastating moral consequences of the Early Modern 
Western domestic Wars of Religion. On the political plane, however, 
these two contemporary and psychologically similar Orthodox Christian 
Westernizing movements followed very different courses. 

This difference was due to a diversity in the political situation in 
which the two sister societies found themselves at the turn of the fifteenth 
and sixteenth centuries, when the modern impact of the West on both 
of them began. At that time, either society was in its universal state; but, 
whereas the Russian Orthodox Christian universal state was an indigen¬ 
ous one that had been brought into being by the Muscovite Grand Duke 
Ivan Ill’s annexation of Novgorod to Muscovy in the eighth decade of 
the fifteenth century, the main body of Orthodox Christendom had had 
its universal state imposed on it by alien Ottoman hands about a hundred 
years earlier; 1 and this difference in the origin and character of the two 
universal states led the two societies to give different political answers 
to the same ‘Western Question’. The seventeenth-century' Russian 
Westernizing movement was evoked, as we have seen, 2 primarily by a 
fear that an indigenous Russian universal state might be overthrown by 
Western Powers who had demonstrated their military superiority in the 
Wars of a.d. 1558-1617; the seventeenth-century Serb and Greek 
Westernizing movements were evoked not by a fear but by a hope that 
an alien Ottoman Empire might be overthrown by Western Powers who 
were demonstrating their military' superiority over the ‘Osmanlis in the 
War of a.d. 1682-99. In Russia a Westernizing movement designed to 
salvage the independence of an existing Russian state was launched from 
above downwards by a cultural revolutionary who was at the same time 
the Tsar and who used his sovereign power to impose Westernization 
on his subjects willy nilly; in the Ottoman Empire, Westernizing move- 

1 The Ottoman dominion over the main body of Orthodox Christendom was effec¬ 
tively established in A.D. 1371-2, when the ‘Osmanlis conquered Macedonia (sec III. 
iii. 26). * On pp. 132-4, above. 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 151 

ments that ultimately aspired to recapture political independence for 
Serbs, Greeks, and other subject Orthodox Christian peoples by under¬ 
mining and subverting an existing Ottoman Power were launched from 
below upwards, not by princes performing acts of state, but through the 
private enterprise of non-sovereign individuals and communities. 

The Ottoman Greek Orthodox Christian Phobia of the West 

It may be convenient first to examine the seventeenth-century cul¬ 
tural reorientation of Serb and Greek souls from an Ottoman towards a 
Western qiblah ; then to trace the course of the consequent Westernizing 
movement on the cultural, social, and political planes; and finally to 
consider the eventual effect of Westernization on the relations between 
these non-Russian Orthodox Christian peoples and a Modern Western 
World whose impact had turned their lives also upside down. 

The seventeenth-century revolution in the attitude of Orthodox 
Christians towards the West signified an even greater change in Serb and 
Greek than in Russian hearts if the respective degrees of their previous 
hostility towards the West can be gauged by the respective lengths to 
which they had shown themselves willing to go in sacrificing their other 
interests to an overriding determination not to submit to Western 
ascendancy in its medieval form of an assertion of Papal supremacy on 
the ecclesiastical plane. While the Russian ‘Zealots’ had egged on the 
Greek 'Zealots’ to repudiate the ecclesiastical union of the Eastern 
Orthodox with the Roman Church that had been achieved on paper at 
Florence in a.d. 1439, l ^' s anti-Western intransigence of theirs had cost 
them no appreciable sacrifice, since they had not been confronted, as the 
Greeks had been in this crisis, with the grim prospect of having to pay 
forthwith for their strict ecclesiastical virtue at the exorbitant political 
price of forfeiting the last shreds of their independence to a Turkish 
Muslim conqueror. In the years a.d. 1453-61, which saw Greek rule at 
Constantinople, in the Morea, and at Trebizond extinguished by the 
Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II the Conqueror, the Tatar tide was already 
ebbing from the steppe-coast of Muscovy, while, on her opposite 
frontier, the Lithuanian tide was no longer advancing. 1 Thus the 
Russians, unlike the Greeks and Serbs, had not been compelled to 
choose between the Pope’s tiara and the Prophet’s turban; 2 and, if the 
Russians nevertheless found it psychologically difficult to reverse their 

* It had reached its high-water mark in A.D. 1449. and it began to recede in A.D. 1494 
(see Spruncr, K. von, and Menke, Th.: Hand-Allot fur die Getchichte des Mitulalters 
unddrr Ntveren Zcit, 3rd ed. (Gotha 1880, Perthes), plates 69 and 70). 

* See the passage, in Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the 
Roman Empire, chap, lxviii, that has been cited in I. i. 29 and IV. iv. 71. Kpa-rrOstpoy 
ionv elSitoi «V 7$ voXei to ^<uaoAtov' fiaotXevov Tovdkcov yjKahurrrpav Aannxijr, is 
the original Greek of the exclamation ascribed to the Grand Duke Louki* Notoris by 
the Greek historian Dhoiikas: Historia Byzantina, ed. by Bekker, J.^Bonn 1834, Weber), 

f . 264. The corresponding popular catchword was npdrrov iuireottv «‘S X ,! P ai 
ovokuiv n ^payKwv, ibid., p. 291. As early as the twelfth century the same preference 
in face of the same choice had been indicated by the Oecumenical Patriarch Michael 
Ankhfalos (fungebatur a.d. i 160—i i 77) in a passage quoted by Every, G.: The Byzantine 
Patriarchate, 451-1204 (London 1947. S.P.C.h.), pp. 182-3. The vehemence of the 
Orthodox Christians’ anti-Western feeling in the fifteenth century is indicated by the 
fact that such 'slogans’ were current in Constantinople in A.D. 1453 when Mehmed 
the Conqueror was at the gates. 



152 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
attitude towards the West two hundred years later, it must have been 
still more difficult for their contemporary Greek and Serb co-religionists 
to recede from a stand against the West which they had maintained at 
the cost of subjection to Ottoman rule. 

The traditional phobia of the West in Greek Orthodox Christian 
souls did, indeed, die hard. It cost the life of the Westernizing Cretan 
Greek Oecumenical Patriarch Cyril Loukaris (vivebat a.d. 1572-1638; 
munere pairiarchali oecumenico fungebatur aj>. 1620-38), and, some five 
generations later, it was still strong enough to frustrate the intellectual 
labours of the Westernizing Greek humanist Evy&nios Voulgharis (vive¬ 
bat a.d. 1716-1806). 

The Defeat of Cyril Loukaris' 

Lotikaris paid with his life for being the Orthodox Christian pioneer 
in a first attempt to establish communion between the Orthodox Christian 
and the Protestant churches; and his fatal failure to carry his own church 
with him in this ecclesiastical manceuvre is the more remarkable, con¬ 
sidering that Loukaris’ strategic aim was to establish an Orthodox-Protes- 
tant common front against a Roman Catholicism which, in Orthodox 
Christian eyes in Loukaris’ day, was still the classic version of a Western 
schismatic Christianity. 

While Loukaris had been mentally prepared for his role as a Wcstern- 
izer by having received a Western education on Western ground, 2 his 
policy of Westernization in the particular form of an entente with 
Calvinism was the outcome of a mission to Poland-Lithuania on which 
he was sent in a.d. 1596 by his kinsman and patron Meletios Pighds, the 
Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria and at that time also Acting Oecumeni¬ 
cal Patriarch of Constantinople. The occasion of this mission was the 
ecclesiastical crisis precipitated by the move, in a.d. 1594, for a union 
of the Orthodox Church in Poland-Lithuania with the Roman Church 3 
on the terms agreed at Florence in a.d. 1439. One motive for this move 
was the political problem that would have been created for the Kingdom 
of Poland-Lithuania by the transfer of these Orthodox Christian subjects 
of a Western state from the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Oecumenical 
Patriarchate of Constantinople, under which they had remained hitherto, 
to that of the autocephalous Patriarchate of Moscow, 4 newly established 
in a.d. 1589, 5 which styled itself ‘the Patriarchate of all Russia’, and 
whose incumbent was a political subject of the Tsar of Muscovy. 6 

1 Sec Meyer, Ph., a.v. ‘Lukaris, Kyrillos*. in Herzog, J. J., and Hauck, A.: Real- 
encyklopsdiefur Protestantische Theologie und Kirche, vol. xi (Leipzig 1902, Hinrichs), 
Dp. 6S2-90; Rhenium, M.: KvpiXXos Aovnapir, 6 Oixovuenxoi harpidpx^i (Athens 1859, 
Mavrommiitis); Pichler, A.: DerPatriarch Cyrillus Lukaris undseineZeit (Munich 1862, 
Lcntner (Stahl)); Mettctal, A.: Eludes Hisloviques sur le Palriareht Cyrille Lucar (Stras¬ 
bourg 1869, Silbermann). Two hundred and sixteen documents concerning Lodkaris’ 
life and tenets will be found in Lcgrand, E.: Bibliographic HelUnique, ou Description 
Rais on nee des Outrages Publiis par des Crecs au Dvc-seplieme Siiele (Paris 1894-1903, 
Picard (vol*. i-iv) and Maisonneuve (vol. v)), vol. iv, pp. 175-521. 

1 See p. 171, below. J Sec p. r28, above. 

4 See Pichler, A.; Der Patriarch Cyrillus Lukaris undseine Zeit (Munich r862, Lent- 
ner), p. 54. _ _ » See VI. vii. 34-35. 

6 The distance of Russia from Constantinople had made it possible (see pp. 676-7, 
below) for Russian princes to accept, without having to fear any awkward political conse¬ 
quences in practice, an ecclesiastical j urisdiction which was felt to be an intolerable poli tical 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 153 

Lorikaris was posted in a.d. 1596 to the rectorship of the Orthodox 
monastery at Vilna in order to act as Meletios’s unofficial observer,' 
and he was Meletios’s official exarch in Poland from July 1599 to 
March 1601. 2 He was present 1 at the anti-Uniate Orthodox synod at 
Brest in a.d. 1596, 4 and at a joint synod of the Orthodox and Protestant 
churches of Poland-Lithuania which opened at Vilna on the 15th May, 
1599.5 This attempt at an Orthodox-Protestant union on Polish- 
Lithuanian soil broke down, in spite of the incentive of a common 
menace in the shape of the Counter-Reformation, owing to an insistence, 
on the Orthodox side, that the Protestants should accept the Oecumeni¬ 
cal Patriarch’s ecclesiastical supremacy; 6 yet this diplomatic failure 
neither checked Loukaris’ ecclesiastical career nor deterred him from his 
subsequent Calvinizing course. 

In a.d. 1602, before he had turned thirty, Loukaris succeeded Meletios 
as Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria; 7 he became Acting Oecumenical 
Patriarch in a.d. 1612, 8 and Oecumenical Patriarch in a.d. 1620; 9 and the 
hostility that he drew upon himself by his courage in using this eminent 
position as a vantage point for the pursuit of a revolutionary policy 
made his career stormy and his end tragic. Between his enthronement in 
a.d. 1620 and his execution in a.d. 1638 he experienced vicissitudes of 

menace (see IV. iv. 377 ~S 3 ) by a Khan of Bulgaria whose dominion slay at Constantinople’s 
doors. The fact that in constitutional theory they were acknowledging the political sove¬ 
reignty of a foreign potentate in accepting the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of an Oecumenical 
Patriarch who was that foreign potentate’s subject and minister did not deter the Rus¬ 
sians from declaring themse Ives the Oecumenical Patriarch’s ecclesiastical subjects by 
receiving a Greek candidate of the Patriarch’s as Metropolitan of Kiev in A.D. 1039 (see 
pp. 399-400, below), though at that date the Oecumenical Patriarch’s sovereign lord was 
the Emperor of an East Roman Empire which, to outward appearance, was then still at 
the zenith of its power (actually it had already brought both itself and the whole Ortho¬ 
dox Christian body social to ruin, through an internecine war with Bulgaria in a.d. 977- 
1019). A fortiori, in subsequent chapters of history, the Russians had not to fear that the 
Oecumenical Patriarch’s jurisdiction over their church might be used at an effective 
political lever either by the impotent Palaioldghi or by the infidel ’Osmanlis. 

A new situation, however, was created in the North by the political partition of Russian 
Orthodox Christendom between Poland-Lithuania and Muscovy and by the subsequent 
secession of the Metropolitanate of Moscow from the Patriarchate or Constantinople 
in a.d. 1441 (see pp. 398, below) and the establishment of an autocephalous Patriarchate of 
Moscow in a.d. 1589 with a pretension to exercise jurisdiction over All Russia* and this 
new situation was analogous to that which had arisen in the main body of Orthodox 
Christendom in the ninth and tenth centuries as a result of the conversion of Bulgaria 
to Orthodox Christianity. If the Orthodox Christian Russian populations under Polish 
and Lithuanian sovereignty were to be transferred from the Oecumenical Patriarch’s 
ecclesiastical jurisdiction to the new Patriarch of Moscow’s, the King of Poland- 
Lithuania and his Orthodox Christian subjects of Russian nationality would then find 
themselves, vis-a-vis the Tsar of Muscovy, in the position in which the Khan of Bul¬ 
garia had found himself vis-d-vis the East Roman Emperor. The Orthodox Christian 
provinces of a sixteenth-century Poland-Lithuania lay as dangerously near to Moscow 
as a ninth-century Bulgaria had lain to Constantinople; and a powerful Orthodox Tsar 
of Muscovy who had the Patriarch of Moscow under his thumb might use the Patriarch 
of Moscow’s pretension to exercise ecclesiastical jurisdiction over Russian Orthodox 
Christians who were Polish and Lithuanian subjects as an effective instrument for 

C litical interference in the affairs of a neighbouring state which he had strong motives 
r undermining and dominating if he could. 

» See Meyer, op. cit., p. 68j; Pichlcr, op. cit., p. 56; Mettetal, op. at., p. 23. 

* See Pichler, op. cit., p. 60. 

J See Mettetal. op. cit., p. 28. 4 See p. 128, above. 

J See Mettetal, op. cit., p. 31. * Sec Mettetal, op. cit., p. 32* 

? See Meyer, op. cit., p. 68s; Pichler, op. cit., p. 67; Rhcm6ris, op. cit., p. 17. 

* Sec Pichler, op. cit., p. 69. 

« On the 4th November, 1620, according to Meyer, op. cit., p. 687. Mettetal, op. cit., 
p. 63, and Rhcnidris. op. cit., p. 25, give the year as 1621. 



154 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
fortune 1 that were as sharp as the tribulations of his predecessor Photius 
and were due to the same cause as these. The similarity between the 
careers of these two distinguished incumbents of the Oecumenical 
Patriarchate is indeed striking. 2 Both patriarchs ventured to engage in 
ecclesiastical warfare with the Roman Church; 3 each of them was ulti¬ 
mately at the mercy of an autocratic temporal sovereign to whom he was 
doubly accountable as a subject who was at the same time also a public 
servant ex officio munerispatriarchate ; and each, in his dealings both with 
his Roman ecclesiastical adversaries and with his Constantinopolitan 
sovereign lord, was betrayed by an opposition within the ranks of his 
own Orthodox Christian community which played into his alien enemies’ 
hands. 

The revolutionary feature in Loukaris’ policy was not, of course, his 
anti-Roman stand. In this he was faithfully interpreting the contem¬ 
porary feelings of an overwhelming majority of his co-religionists under 
Ottoman rule, and even his opponents within his own flock must have 
secretly admired his boldness in defying Rome and have felt ashamed, 
in their heart of hearts, of the timidity or self-interest that deterred them 
from showing the same spirit. Nor had the Ottoman Government any 
quarrel with Lodkaris on this account, for in Ottoman minds in this age 
the Roman Church was identified with the Hapsburg Power, which was 
the Ottoman Power’s Western arch-enemy both on the Danubian and 
on the Mediterranean front. 4 The revolutionary policy that was Lodkaris’ 
unpardonable offence in the eyes of his Orthodox critics was his desire 
for an entente with the Western Protestant secessionists from the ranks 
of his and their Western Roman Catholic adversaries. 5 In these ‘Zealot’ 

i Loiikaris was banished in February 1623 (Pichler, op. cit., p. 113) and reinstated 
in 1624 (p. 124); banished in October 1633 and quickly reinstated (p. 162); banished in 
March 1634 ar.d reinstated in June 1634 (p. 162); banished in March 1635 and reinstated 
in July 1636 (pp. 162-3). 

J Photius's career has been touched upon in IV. iv. 606-7. 

* In this connexion it should be mentioned that Pichler, one of the authorities cited 
in this chapter, was a Roman Catholic. 

* This traditional Ottoman hostility to Catholicism was a serious impediment to the 
Constantinopolitan Jesuits who ultimately got rid of LoOkaris by persuading the Sultan 
to have him executed. The first Jesuit mission in Constantinople established itself in 
A.D. 1583-6 (Pichler, op. cit., p. tz6). In A.D. 1609 a second Jesuit mission was intro¬ 
duced under the auspices of the French (Pichler, op. cit., p. 117), who were personae 
gratae to the ‘Osmanlis as being Roman Catholics who were nevertheless enemies of the 
Hapsburgs. In a.d. 1628 the Jesuits were actually expelled by the Porte, at the instance 
of the English and Venetian Ambassadors (Pichler, op. cit., p. 134; RhenUris. op. cit., 
p. 49), in the storm raised by the Ottoman authorities' seizure, at the Jesuits’ instigation, 
of a Greek printing press that had been brought to Constantinople from England in 
June 1627 by Nikddhimos Metaxis (see p. 164, n. 1, below). Nevertheless, the Jesuits 
contrived, not only to find their way back to Constantinople, but to have a hand in the 
taking of Lodkaris life (sec von Hammer, J.: Histoire de VEmpire Ottoman, French trans¬ 
lation, vol. ix (Paris 1837. Bcllizard, Barthis, Dufour, et Lowell), p. 306). 

A pro-Loukaran pamphlet, published in a.d. 1633 as an appendix to a polemical work 
against the Society of Jesus, and dealing with the Jesuits' intrigues against LnJkari* 
at Constantinople in a.d. 1627 and 1628, is cited in Legrand, E.: Bibliographic UelUnique, 
ou Description Raisomite des Ouvrages publics par des Grtcs au Dix-Seplientc Siicle, vol. 
iii (Paris 1895, Picard), No. 706, pp. 87-88. 

J Both the place and the time of Loukaris’ first attraction towards Western Protestant 
ideas arc obscure. He was. of course, in political relations with Polish Protestants during 
his sojourn in Poland-Lithuania during the years a.d. 1596-1601 (see p. 152, above), 
but, a* we have seen, in this episode of history a common opposition to Roman Catholi¬ 
cism did not avail to bring the Orthodox and Protestant Christian communities in 
Poland into communion with one another. Ixxikaris is alleged by some authorities to 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 155 
Orthodox eyes the Protestants’ merit of being anti-Roman was quite 
eclipsed by their crime of being still Western and therefore still, from an 
Orthodox standpoint, schismatic; and, in the intricate encounter be¬ 
tween Loukaris, theConstantinopolitan Jesuits, the Orthodox Church in 
the Ottoman Empire, and the Ottoman Government, the Orthodox 
opposition and the Padishah were as blind as the Jesuits were clear¬ 
sighted. 

The unscrupulousness of the representations through which the 
Jesuits cajoled the Sultan into putting Lotikaris to death was all of a 
piece with their discernment in divining that, in seeking to redress the 
balance between Eastern Orthodoxy and Western Roman Catholicism 
by attracting Protestantism into the Orthodox scale, Lotikaris had 
conjured up a threat to the Tridcntine Roman Church which might be¬ 
come deadly if its author were to be allowed an opportunity of putting 
this revolutionary Orthodox strategy into effect. 1 On the other hand, 
Sultan Murad IV', in allowing himself to be persuaded to order the 
execution of Loukaris in June 1638,* was less well advised than his 
imperial predecessor the East Roman Emperor Basil I had been when 
he had disposed of Photius by reinstating him, in a.d. 877, on his 

have visited Wittenberg and Geneva (Pichler, op. cit., p. 62) and even France and 
England (Mcttctal, op. cit., p. 23); and Pichler accepts the visits to Wittenberg and 
Geneva as authentic, and conjectures that Lotikaris paid these two visits after his mission 
in Poland, though he find* no evidence that Lotikaris ever travelled farther west than 
Geneva (op. cit., p. 65). Meyer, on the other hand, believes (op. cit., p. 685) that the 
alleged visits to Wittenberg and Geneva are also apocryphal, and that Lotikaris never 
waited any of the Protestant centres in Western Christendom at any date—either after 
his mission in Poland-Lithuania or during his previous sojourn in Venice and Padua. 
He points out that there is no mention of any such visits in the original historical sources, 
and that the legend of a visit to Geneva, in particular, is refuted by the absence of any 
reference to it in a letter, recommending Leger to Lotikaris, that was written to Lotikaris 
by the Genevan theologians in a.d. 1628. 

The earliest indubitably authentic record of Lotikaris’ inclination towards Protestant¬ 
ism is in a letter written by Lotikaris himself, on the 6th September, 1618, to M. A. de 
Dominis, in which he writes of his having made a three years’ study—presumably at 
Constantinople—of Protestant theological works (the relevant passage from this letter 
is quoted bv Meyer, op. cit., p. 685, from Legrand, E.: Bibliogrcphie HrUMque. ou 
Description Raintmit det Outrages Publics par de Grets au XVII™ Sticle, vol. iv (Paris 
1896, Picard), pp. 333-40). Lotikaris docs not say which three years these were; but 
Meyer points out that on the 4th June, 1613, he was finding it necessary to defend him¬ 
self publicly against a charge of Lutheranism. 

1 As Acting Oecumenical Patriarch, Lotikaris paid two visits, one in A.D. 1613 and 
the second in a.d. 1616 (Pichler, op. cit., pp. 75 and 87) to Wallachia, an autonomous 
Orthodox Christian principality under Ottoman suzerainty whose population was under 
the Oecumenical Patriarebate's ecclesiastical jurisdiction. On his second visit he ex¬ 
horted the people of the city and see of Tergovishtc, and the prince of Wallachia, Radul, 
to resist Roman Catholic propaganda (Pichler, op. cit., pp. 88 and 90). After his installa¬ 
tion on the Oecumenical Throne in a.d. 1620, Lotikaris issued an encyclical forbidding 
his ecclesiastical subjects to have intercourse with Roman Catholics (Rhenidris, op. cit., 
p. 31). The Jesuits’ retort to this was to put up a rival candidate for the Patriarchal 
Throne, and to bring about the first of Lotikaris’ successive banishments by persuading 
the Ottoman Government to relegate him to Rhodes on the insinuation that he had been 
intriguing with the Tuscan Government. Thereupon the Jesuits duly secured their own 
candidate’s installation, but Lotikaris then obtained his first reinstatement through the 
exertions of the English Ambassador, Sir Thomas Roe—after the anti-patriarch had 
been compelled to retire to Mount Athos, in spite of the French Ambassador’s efforts 
to keep him in office (Rhenidris, op. cit., pp. 31-36). In A.D. 1625 Lotikaris was 
approached by the Vatican with an offer of its protection if he would publicly accept 
the decisions of the Council of Florence and denounce Protestantism (Pichler, op. cit., 
p. 125; Rhenidris. op. cit., p. 38). Lotikaris left this overture unanswered (Rhenidris, 
op. cit.. p. 40). 

* See Pichler, op. cit., p. 177; Rhenidris, op. cit., p. 65. 



156 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
patriarchal throne on the understanding that the policy which the re¬ 
installed patriarch would carry out thereafter would be his master’s and 
not his own. The Sultan had not the Orthodox Opposition’s excuse for 
letting himself be led into playing the Jesuits’ game, for there were no 
traditional religious animosities or scruples to deter a Sunni Muslim 
potentate from combating a Roman Catholic form of infidelity by un¬ 
leashing against it a Calvinist form of infidelity whose doctrine and 
ethos had a marked affinity with those of Islam itself; and indeed in 
Hungary', for a hundred years and more, it had been an axiom of Otto¬ 
man policy to champion a liberated Protestant minority against their 
former Hapsburg Catholic oppressors. 

Loukaris’ enemies contrived nevertheless to infuriate the Sultan with 
the Patriarch by suggesting to Murad that Loukaris was politically 
responsible for the piratical enterprises of his ecclesiastical subjects, the 
Don Cossacks, against the Ottoman Empire. 1 In a.d. 16x5 the Don 
Cossacks had made their first naval raid into the Bosphorus; 1 and in 
a.d. 1638, on the eve of Sultan Murid IV’s departure from Constanti¬ 
nople on an Heraclian campaign to recover Asiatic Ottoman provinces 
that had been overrun by the Persians, the news arrived that the Don 
Cossacks had seized the strategically important Ottoman fortress of 
Azov by a coup de main} Murid was struggling to retrieve the Ottoman 
Empire from the anarchy into which it had lapsed since the death of 
Suleyman the Magnificent, 4 and he was a man of demonic temperament. 
In his exasperation at this unexpected and untimely military diversion 
at a moment when it was imperative for him to concentrate all his 
strength against the Safawl Power, he yielded impulsively to an insidious 
suggestion that the Oecumenical Patriarch should be made the scapegoat 
for a Cossack escapade which was not only out of the Patriarch’s control 
de facto but was also beyond the limits of his responsibility de jure} 

The action on Loukaris’ part that evoked the opposition to him among 
his own Orthodox co-religionists was his rapprochement with the 
Protestants with a view to a Protestant-Orthodox ecclesiastical union. 
Loukaris proposed to base this union on the two parties’ common 


1 For the Cossacks, sec II. ii. 155-7. P° r seventeenth-century eruption of the 
Don Cossacks into the Black Sea, sec III. iii. 418 and 428. 

2 See Allen, W. E. D.: The Ukraine, A History (Cambridge 1940, University Press), 
p. 93. 

1 See Pichlcr, op. cit., p. 176. * See V. vi. 207-8. 

* Sultan Murad would have become aware of Loukaris’ innocence if he had paused 
to take account of the difference between his respective jurisdictions and responsibilities 
as Oecumenical Patriarch and as millet-bishy of the Ottoman Miliet-i-Rum. As the 
ex officio political head of all Orthodox Christians under Ottoman rule, including those 
who were not within the Oecumenical Patriarchate’s ecclesiastical jurisdiction, the 
Oecumenical Patriarch was in truth responsible to the Sultan for their loyalty to the 
Ottoman Empire. On the other hand the Oecumenical Patriarch could not reasonably 
be held accountable politically for the acts of Orthodox Christians who, like the Don 
Cossacks, were not Ottoman subjects, even though they might be under the Oecumenical 
Patriarch’s ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Since the establishment of an autocephalous 
Patriarchate of Moscow in a.d. 1589 and the union of a majority of the Orthodox 
Christian subjects of the Kingdom of Poland-Lithuania with the Roman Church in 
a.d. 1594-6. the ecclesiastical jurisdiction which the Oecumenical Patriarch had pre¬ 
viously exercised over the whole of Russian Orthodox Christendom had contracted 
almost to vanishing point. It was unlucky for Loukaris that the remnant of his Russian 
flock happened to include Don Cossacks who made themselves obnoxious to Sultan 
Murid at a critical moment in Murid’s as well as in Lovikaris' career. 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 157 
acceptance of the Scriptures and the Fathers and to safeguard this exist¬ 
ing basis by a mutual undertaking to make no innovations; 1 and in a.d. 
1627 proposals to this effect—with the additional stipulation that either 
party should retain its own existing rites, 2 provided that these were not 
contrary to religion—arc said to have been laid before the Calvinist 
doctors at Geneva by Mitrophdnis Kritdpoulos, 3 a disciple of Lotikaris’ 
who had been sent by Loukaris to England on an invitation from Abbott, 
the Archbishop of Canterbury, and had spent seven years (a.d. 1617-24) 
in the Protestant universities of Oxford and Helmstddt. 4 In a.d. 1629 a 
Confessio was published in Loukaris’ name in Western Christendom; 5 
and, after this had been denounced by Catholics as a forger)’, 6 Loukaris 
is said to have made a public declaration that he was the author of it. 7 
The cardinal points in Loukaris’ Confessio were the Calvinist doctrines of 
justification by faith and the non-infallibility of the Church, with a conse¬ 
quent rejection of the Church’s pretension to have the last word in the 
interpretation of the Scriptures. 8 

Meanwhile, the tide had already turned against Loukaris’ policy of 
an Orthodox-Calvinist common front. The Genevan doctors—if the 
story that Mitrophdnis Kritdpoulos made proposals to them is true—had 
proved unwilling to commit themselves without having first obtained 


the statesmanlike 


1 See Metietal, op. cit., p. 45. 

* This mutual toleration of diverse rites was presumably inspired by i 
provisions, on this point, of the Orthodox-Roman Catholic Union of 
> 439 - 

* Sec Mettetal, op. cit., pp. 76-77. The Roman Catholic authority, Pichlcr, op. cit., 
pp. 97-98, admits that Mitrophdnis Kritdpoulos visited Geneva in October 1627, but 
discounts, as apocryphal, the story that on this occasion he brought with him formal 
proposals for union. Kritdpoulo* certainly took sides against Loukaris at a later stage. 
He signed the acts of the Synod of Constantinople that condemned Loukaris in a.d. 
1638 (Meyer, op. cit..p. 689). 

4 See Pichler, op. cit., pp. 92-941 RheniVris, op. cit., p. 24. 

* Particulars of two Latin editions, four French editions, and one English and Latin 
edition of I^dkaris’ Confettio , all published in Western Christendom in A.n. 1629, will 
be found in Legrand, E.: Bibliolkf/jue HrlUnique, on Description Rationttie det Ouvraget 
Publics par det Greet au Dix-Septtbne Slide, vol. i (Paris 1894, Picard), pp. 267-72. 
According to Meyer, op. cit., p. 688, a German edition was also published in the same 
year. 

6 It is certain, nevertheless, that the Confettio is an authentic work of the Oecumenical 
Patriarch in whose name it was published. On p. 8 of one of the two Latin editions of 
A.D. 1629 (Legrand's No. 189) there appears, over the signature ‘Cornelius Haga, 
Confoederatorum Belgic. Provinciarum pro tempore apud Portam Ottomanici Impera- 
toris Orator’, the declaration: ‘Dcscripta fuit haec copia ex autographo, quod propria 
Rcvcrendissimi Domini Patriarchae Cyrilli menu, quam optime cognosco, scriptum 
penes me manet, et, per me fact® collatione, eum cum hoc ipso dc verbo ad verbum con- 
venire, attestor.’ The Dutch Ambassador to the Porte might perhaps have written this in 
error or in bad faith. There is, however, a Greek edition ot the Confettio, published at 
Geneva in a.d. 1633 by Jean de Toumes (No. 224 in Legrand, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 315- 
21), which was printed from a manuscript original in Lodkaris’ hand and bearing his 
signature. This original manuscript was afterwards preserved in the public library at 
Geneva, and a facsimile of the first sheet of it will be found in Legrand. op. cit., vol. cit., 
facing p. 218. In Legrand’s judgement (ibid., p. 318} the handwriting is identical with 
that of other manuscripts known to be from Lodkaris' hand. There was an autograph 
signed copy of the Greek text at Geneva in the same bundle as the original, and another 
autograph signed copy at Leyden, in a.d. 1894, when thia volume of Legrand’s waa 

P » See the Latin preface to the Geneva edition of the Greek text, quoted in Legrand, 
op. cit., vol. i, p. 316; Pichler, op. cit.^j»p. 150 and 153 


* See Pichler, op. cit., 
was an exposition of Ca' 
(Meyer, op. cit., p. 688). 


t., pp. 183-9; Mettetal, op. cit., p. 87. In genera! the Confettio 
Calvinism in traditional Orthodox Christian theological terms 



158 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
the agreement of their co-religionists in Switzerland, Germany, Holland, 
and England, 1 * while on the Orthodox side Yerasimos—Loukaris’ suc¬ 
cessor on the patriarchal throne of Alexandria, which, of all Orthodox 
sees on Ottoman soil, was second only to the Oecumenical Patriarchate 
itself in dignity and influence—had immediately come out in public as 
the leader of a militant opposition. 1 Yerasimos was given his opportunity 
by an overture from the Dutch Ambassador at Constantinople, who in 
a.d. 1628 had brought from Geneva a Piedmontese Calvinist theologian, 
Anton Leger, to propagate Calvinism among the Ottoman Orthodox 
from a post of vantage as the Ambassador’s chaplain. 3 This overture 
from the Calvinist side was rebuffed by Yerdsimos in a public pro¬ 
nouncement on the 8th July, 1629. 4 The Patriarch of Alexandria re¬ 
jected the pica for an Orthodox-Protestant common front against Roman 
Catholicism and denounced the translation of the Bible into the vernacu¬ 
lar 5 on the ground that God’s revelation was intentionally obscure and 
that it was more important to ensure that the faithful should remain 
Orthodox than that the Scriptures should be made intelligible. 6 ‘The 
seamless robe of Christ . . . would be torn into a thousand pieces by 
the Occidentals.’ 7 A castigation of 'the Confessio circulated in Cyril the 
Patriarch of Constantinople’s name’, by John Matthew Karyophillis, 
the Orthodox Archbishop of Qonlych, was published at Rome in Latin 
in a.d. 1631 and in Greek, in two versions, in a.d. 1632, and this polemic 
was dedicated by its Orthodox author to Pope Urban VIII. 8 

This counter-attack on Loukaris within his own camp when he was 
alive and in occupation of the Oecumenical Throne was vigorously 
followed up after his final disgrace and death. On the 27th September, 
1639, the dead Oecumenical Patriarch was anathematized 9 by a synod 
which had been convened at Constantinople by Cyril Kdndaris, the 
Orthodox Bishop of Bercea, 10 and which was attended by three Patriarchs, 
including Loukaris’ disciple Mitrophdnis Kritdpoulos—now Patriarch 
of Alexandria. 11 This act was confirmed by a Graeco-Russian synod 
convened at Jassy, under the presidency of the Oecumenical Patriarch 

1 See Mettctal, op. tit., p. 77. 

1 For this opposition, sec Meyer, op. cit., p. 688. 

J Sec Meyer, op. cit., p. 688 ; Pichlcr, op. cit., p. 143; Rhcni^ris, op. cit., pp. 51-52. 
Leger stayed at Constantinople till a.d. 1636. 

* Sec Meyer, op. tit., p. 689; Pichler, op. tit„p. 144; Mettctal, op. cit., p. 78. 

J The Elxcvir edition of the Greek text of the Gospels was translated from the Attic 
KOiyr] into the Modern Greek 817/1071*7 on Loukaris’ orders at Leger’* instance (RhenUris, 
op. cit., p. 53), though it did not reach Constantinople from Geneva, where it had been 
published in a.d. 1638, till after Lodkaris' death (Meyer, op. cit., p. 688). This was 
perhaps the first shot fired in a Modem Greek cultural civil war on tnc issue raised by 
Linguistic Archaism (see V. vi. 68-71). 

6 See Pichler, op. cit., pp. X45-6. It is significant that similar sentiments had once 
been expressed by Lodkaris. In a letter of the 30th May, i6« 2, to a Dutch correspondent, 
J. Uytcnbogaert (Wtenbogaert), he had declared that the ruin of Greek education by 
the Turks had brought with it one benefit, at any rate: it had safeguarded the Greeks 
against heresy (Pichler, op. cit., p. 72). 

7 Quoted in Mcttetal, op. cit, p. 79. 

8 See Legrand, op. cit., vol. i. No. 209 (pp. 2SS-9) and Nos. 216-17 <PP> 304-6). 

9 See Pichler, op. cit., pp. 217 and 226; Mettctal, op. cit., p. 102. Meyer, op. cit., 
p. 680, gives the date of the Synod’s findings as a.d. 1638. 

to See Rhcni6ris, op. tit., p. 59: Pichler, op. cit, p. axe. Kdndaris was an alumnus of 
the Jesuit College founded at Galata in a.d. x6oi (Rhemiris, op. tit., p. 19). 

11 See Pichler, op. tit., p. 216; Meyer, op. cit, p. 689. 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 159 
Parthenios’s legates, in a.d. 1642, 1 and thereafter by a synod convened at 
Jerusalem in a.d. 1672* which was bitterly anti-Calvinist in its pro¬ 
nouncements 3 but was not widely representative of Orthodoxy in its 
membership, since, apart from two Russian monks, it was not attended 
by any fathers not belonging to the hierarchy of the Patriarchate of 
Jerusalem itself. 4 The final blow was struck at a synod held in Constan¬ 
tinople in a.d. 1 691. 5 

If Loukaris had succeeded in persuading his Orthodox flock and his 
Calvinist friends to enter into an ecclesiastical union with one another 
under the presidency of the Oecumenical Patriarchate, he would have 
anticipated, by nearly three hundred years, Stalin’s feat of appropriating 
a Western heresy to serve as a new weapon against the prevailing Western 
orthodoxy of the day. And who can say what the consequences might 
have been if, instead of putting Loukaris to death, Sultan Murad had 
had the wit to follow up a traditionally philo-Protcstant Ottoman policy 
by taking a philo-Protestant Oecumenical Patriarch under his imperial 
patronage? In its predestinarianism and in its rejection of ‘priestcraft’ 
and ‘image-worship’—two traditional Christian institutions that were 
Orthodox as well as Catholic—Calvinism had a decidedly greater affinity 
with Islam than with Orthodox Christianity; 6 and, if the Orthodox 
Church in the Ottoman Empire had gone Calvinist in doctrine and 6thos 
as a sequel to a mariage de convenance with the Calvinist churches of 
Western Europe, the intellectual and moral gulf between the Orthodox 
Christian and the Muslim subjects of the Padishah would have been 
appreciably diminished—instead of being accentuated, as it actually was, 
when, in the next chapter of the story, the Orthodox Christian subjects 
of the Ottoman Empire succumbed to the attraction of the Modern 
Western culture in its latter-day secular form. If Cyril Lotikaris had had 

' See Mevcr. op. cit., p. 689; Rheniiris, op. dt, p. 73 - The Greek text of the decree 
of this synod, condemning the Confessio, was published at Jassy on the 20th December, 
164a (Old Style) (Lcgrand, op. cit., vol. iii, No. 708, p. 89), and was republished, together 
with a Latin translation, in A.D. 1643, hy Sebnstien Cramoisy, Printer to the King of 
France (Lcgrand, op. cit., vol. i. No. 337, pp. 4 SO->)- The Corifeuio itself, together with 
the texts of both the Bishop of Bercra’s and the Oecumenical Patriarch’s synodal stric¬ 
tures, all in both Greek and Latin, was published in A.D. 1645 (Lcgrand, op. cit., vol. 

assy is erroneously dated, not a.d. 1642, but a.d. 1644, by N. Jorga: 
Geschichie des Osmaniuhen Roches, vol. iv (Gotha 1911, Perthes), p. 30. Mettetal, op. 
cit., pp. 103-4. records a synod held at Constantinople in a.d. 1643 a * the instance of 
Basil Prince of Moldavia and attended by the Metropolitan of Kiev. As this Synod of 
Constantinople ia not mentioned by any of the other authorities, it is possible that it is 
an erroneous description of the synod actually held in a.d. 1642 at Jassy—unless the 
participants in the proceedings at Jassy subsequently adjourned to Constantinople. 

1 For this synod of Jerusalem see Pichler, op. cit., pp. 230-5*. Mettetal, op. cit., 
p. 106; Rhenidris, op. cit., n. 75. Anti-Western though it was, it was nevertheless a by¬ 
product of a Western religious controversy. In a dispute about Lodkaris between the 
French Huguenots and Port Royal, the Huguenots had boasted that the Orthodox 
Church was Calvinist, and the French Ambassador at Constantinople, dc Nointel, had 
asked the Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, Dositheos, for an explanation. The synod 
of Jerusalem implied, in its findings, that Lodkaris was not the author of the Confesno 
attributed to him (Pichler, op. dt., p. 230). A pair of polemics against Calvinism by 
Meletios righos, one of the two patriarchal legates at Jassy in a.d. 1642, and by Dosi¬ 
theos, were published at Bucarest in a.d. 1690 (Legrand, op. cit., vol. ii. No. 632, pp. 
458 - 473 ). 5 Se * Pichler. op. cit., p. 235. 

* See Pichler, op. dt., p. 233. 5 See Meyer, op. at., p. 689. 

* On this point ace Arnold, T. W.: The Preaching of hlam, and ed. (London 1913. 
Constable), p. 163. 


11, No. 272, p. 14) 
The Synod of J 



160 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
* his way, it is conceivable that the trial of strength between the Ottoman 
Power and the Danubian Hapsburg Power in a.d. 1682-3 wight have 
ended in the discomfiture of Roman Catholicism by the united forces of 
an Islam and an Orthodoxy that had made contact with one another 
across a Calvinist bridge. 

This possible outcome of Loukaris’ policy was ruled out by the com¬ 
bined effects of Jesuit ability, Ottoman blindness, and Orthodox fanati¬ 
cism. By what lengths Lotikaris actually fell short of winning over a 
majority of his Orthodox co-religionists to his Calvinizing policy it is 
difficultto judge, 1 but it is significant that the 'Zealot' spirit which defeated 
a Loukaris in the early decades of the seventeenth century was still 
strong enough in the middle decades of the eighteenth century to baffle 
a Votilgharis. 

The Frustration of Evybiios Voulgharis 

Evydnios Vodlgharis 2 (vivebat a.d. 1716-1806) was a Greek philoso¬ 
pher-educationalist whose impeccable Orthodoxy 3 did not atone, in 
contemporary ecclesiastical Greek Orthodox eyes, for his offences of 
advocating religious toleration and educational reform and cultivating 
contemporary Western philosophy. On these accounts, Voulgharis was 
driven from pillar to post. The hostility of the conservative headmaster 
of a rival school at Ydnnina forced him to relinquish his own school there 
and retreat to Kdzhani. An opportunity that had been opened to him by 
the foundation of a new academy on Mount Athos was closed, after he 
had taught there for six years, by the dissolution of the academy at the 
instance of the ex-Oecumenical Patriarch Cyril, who, unfortunately for 
Votilgharis, was then living in retirement on the Holy Mountain; and, 
after he had had the further disappointment of being forced out of a post 
to which he had been appointed at the Patriarchal Academy in Constanti¬ 
nople, Voulgharis accepted, in a.d. 1775, an invitation from a Petrine 

1 Evidence suggesting that Lotikaris’ following among his own flock was not in¬ 
considerable is presented by Sir Thomas Arnold in op. cit., pp. 163-4. He points out 
that Lotikaris’ Con/tssio was adopted by a synod of his Orthodox supporters (cp. Pichler, 
op. cit., pp. 181 and 228); argues that the very vigour of the opposition, and vehemence 
of their denunciations, testify to a fear on their part that Loukaris’ party might win 
the day; and discounts, as tendentious, the picture of Lotikaris, drawn bv his Orthodox 
opponents, as an isolated figure playing a lone hand (for this picture, see Pichler, op. cit., 
pp. 211 and 227, and Mettetal, op. cit., p. 101). On the other hand, Mcttetal (op. cit., 
p. 91) estimates that the Confessio was received by the Greeks with apathy, and Loukaris 
himself once wrote, in a letter to David le Leu dc Wilhem, a Dutch statesman with whom 
he was in correspondence in the years a.d. 1618-20: ‘Io se puotesse riformarc la mia 
chiesa, lo farei molto volcnticri, ma Iddio sa che Iraclalur de impostibili' (Lcgrand, 
op. cit., vol. iv, p. 326, Doc. 109). 

* For Voulgharis' career, see Thereiands, D.: Adhamdndios Korais (Trieste 1889- 
1890, Austrian Lloyd Press, 3 vols.), vol. i, p. 64, and Finlay, G.: A History of Greece, 
B.c. 146 to a.d. 1864 (Oxford 1877, Clarendon Press, 7 vols.), vol. v, pp. 284-c. 

* VovSlgharis gave evidence of his Orthodox piety in publishing for one of the Phana- 
riot Princes of the House of Ghika, Gregory II (in Moldavia funrebatur a.d. 1764-6 et 
A.n. 1774-7: •" Wallaehu f a.d. 1768-74), an edition of the Evoc&evra of Vrydnr.ios— a 
Byzantine work vindicating the authenticity of miracles—and in eschewing, out of a 
religious scruple, the new-fangled use of the word 'EXXtjv in the sense of an adherent 
of the living Orthodox Christian Modem Greek nationality in lieu of its traditional usage 
in the sense of an adherent of the dead pagan Hellenic Civilization (Thereiands, D.: 
Adhamdndiot Korais (Trieste 1889-90, Austrian Lloyd Press, 3 vols.), vol. i, pp. 73-75 
and 66). 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 161 
Russian Imperial Government which appreciated his qualifications and 
turned them to good account by making him bishop of the new See of 
Slavonia and Kherson in territory recently acquired by Russia from the 
Ottoman Empire in the northern hinterland of the Black Sea. 

Voulgharis’ Zealot Greek Orthodox ecclesiastical persecutors were 
not even content with having thus hounded him out of the domain of 
Greek Orthodox Christendom. In a.d. 1798 the Greek press at Con¬ 
stantinople published a counterblast, by the Patriarch of Jerusalem, 
Anthimos, to a tract written by Votilgharis in favour of religious tolera¬ 
tion, and this eighteenth-century fulmination still breathed the authentic 
spirit of fifteenth-century Orthodox fanaticism. The Patriarch told his 
readers that 

‘when the last emperors of Constantinople began to subject the Oriental 
Church to Papal thraldom, the particular favour of Heaven raised up the 
Othoman Empire to protect the Greeks against heresy, to be a barrier 
against the political power of the Western nations, and to be the champion 
of the Orthodox Church.’ 1 

The Revolution in the Ottoman Orthodox Christians' Attitude towards the 
West 

This classic exposition of a traditional ‘Zealot’ thesis was, however, no 
more than a parting shot in a losing cultural battle which had taken its 
decisive turn more than a hundred years before the close of the eighteenth 
century. 2 In the cultural tug-of-war, for the captivation of Greek, Serb, 
and Rumanian Orthodox Christian souls, between the Ottoman masters 
of these ra'iyeh and their Western neighbours, the West had won be¬ 
fore the seventeenth century was over. The date of this transfer of 
the Orthodox Christian ra'iyeh 's cultural allegiance can be established, 
within rather narrow limits, by the at first sight superficial, yet neverthe¬ 
less psychologically significant, index of changes in fashions of dress, 
and this sartorial testimony is corroborated by evidence in the religious 
field. At the same date, conversions of Orthodox Christian ra'iyeh to 
Islam virtually ceased, and unconverted Orthodox Christian ra'iyeh for 
the first time showed a preference for Hapsburg over Ottoman rule. 

In the seventh decade of the seventeenth century, Ottomanization was 
still the goal of the ra'iyeh 's social ambition, as was observed by the 

> Finlay, op. cit., vol. cit., loc. cit. 

2 The waning power of the Greek Orthodox ecclesiastical hierarchy, which had still 
just availed to frustrate Votilgharis, proved impotent against his intellectual successor 
Korais, though the life-times of these two Greek apostles of the Western culture over¬ 
lapped. Korals, too, in his day, had to defend himself against charges ofjmpiety accord¬ 
ing to a letter published in Komis, Adhamlndios: ’Anav 9 iafUi 'EmrrroX&v (Athens 1S39, 
Rhdllis), p. 2«6; and, from the clerical standpoint, these charges could perhaps be sub¬ 
stantiated on the testimony of Korais’ own written words. 'Rebuild your schools not only 
before your country houses but before your churches’, he wrote to the Chiots.on the 
morrow of the catastrophe of a.d. 1822 (letter of the 12th October, 1822, in' ArravOur/ia, 
pp. 45-47). 'Monastic estates (ficriyia) are an incentive to idleness and ought to be 
abolished' (the same letter, in AndvOiopa, p. 49). In a letter of the 4th July, 1823, on the 
constitution of the new Greek national state, Korais prescribes that the ecclesiastical 
authorities ought to be elected by the laity and to be debarred from participation in 
politics (‘Avdy 0 ia/ta, p. 257)—a French Revolutionary theory that was utterly sub¬ 
versive of the established Ottoman institution of the Mtllet-i-Rum. Votilgharis had been 
censured and thwarted for offences that bore no comparison with these enormities. 

B 28SS.VIU G 



x62 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
shrewd secretary of the English Embassy at Constantinople, Sir Paul 
Rycaut: 

‘It is worth a wise man’s observation how gladly the Greeks and Arme¬ 
nian Christians imitate the Turkish habit, and come as near to it as they 
dare; and how proud they arc when they are privileged upon some extra¬ 
ordinary occasion to appear without their Christian distinction.’ 1 

On the other hand, Demetrius Cantemir, the Ruman grandee who was 
appointed Prince of Moldavia by the Porte in November 1710* and 
deserted to Peter the Great when the Tsar invaded Moldavia in 1711,* 
is represented in a contemporary portrait wearing a bag wig, coat and 
waistcoat, and rapier; and, though in this portrait Cantemir’s Ottoman 
antecedents arc still betrayed by a turban superimposed on his wig and 
by a dagger thrust into his girdle to supplement the rapier at his hip, 4 
these relics of Ottomanism no longer figure in the frontispiece to an 
English translation, published in 1734-5, of Cantemir's history of the 
Ottoman Empire. 5 Nor were there any tell-tale Ottoman accessories in 
the portraits, painted at Pest or Vienna somewhat later in the eighteenth 
century, to judge by the cut of the coats and the style of the wigs, which, 
on the 5th-6th September, 1921, the writer of this Study saw still 
hanging on the panelled walls of houses in the South-West Macedonian 
Greek townlet of Shdtishta to commemorate the overland trade with 
the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy and Saxony that was opened up in 
the eighteenth century by more than one enterprising Rumeliot Greek 
Orthodox Christian community. 6 

These changes in style of dress were, of course, outward visible signs 
of corresponding changes in cast of mind. Demetrius Cantemir, for 
example, could read and write Latin, Italian, and French, as well as his 
Rumanian mother tongue, the Modem and Attic Greek and the Old 
Slavonic that were his Orthodox Christian cultural heritage, and the 
Turkish, Persian, and Arabic that were his cultural stock in trade as an 
Ottoman officer of state; and, after his desertion to the Russian camp, 
he added the Russian language to his repertory. 7 His history of the 
Ottoman Empire, written in Latin and published in French and English 
simultaneously, was perhaps the first to be presented by an Ottoman 
subject in the Western manner. The Rumanian Cantemir’s older Greek 
contemporary Alexander Mavrogordato, 8 who was appointed in A.D. 

* Rycaut, Sir P.: The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (London 1668, Starkey 
and Brome). p. 82. The sixteenth-century Greek Orthodox Christian residents in the 
centres of business in Western Christendom 'wore the dress and assumed the manners 
of Turks; for they found that in Western Europe they were more respected in the 
character of Ottoman subjects than as schismatic Greeks’ (Finlay, G.: A History of 
Greece, b.C. 146-A.D. 1S64, vol. v (Oxford 1877. Clarendon Press), pp. 156-7). 

* Sec Jorga, N.: Gesehichte ties Osmanischen Reiches, vol. iv (Gotha 191 x, Perthes), 

p. 304. 

5 See II. ii. 225, n. x. * Sec Jorga, op. cit., vol. tit., pp. 363-4. 

5 Cantemir, Demetrius: The History of the Growth and Decay of the Ottoman Empire, 
written originally in Latin, translated into English from the author’s own manuscript— 
‘communicated to the translator by his son. Prince Antiochus Cantemir, Minister 
Plenipotentiary from the Czarina to his present Majesty King George’—by N. Tindal, 
M.A., Vicar of Great Waltham in Essex (London 1734-5. Knapton, 2 parts). 

6 For this overland trade, see pp. 18c—2, below. 

» See Jorga, op. cit., vol. cit., loc. cit.; Tindal’s translation of Cantemir, op. cit., part 
ii, p. 460. » See Finlay, op. cit., vol. v, p. 242; Jorga, op. cit., vol. xv, p. 283. 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 163 
1673 to be the second incumbent of the recently created office of Drago¬ 
man of the Porte 1 and who eventually extricated the Ottoman Empire 
from the disastrous war of a . d . 1682-99 by negotiating the peace settle¬ 
ment of Carlowitz, likewise knew Latin, Italian, and French as well 
as Greek, ‘Slav’, 1 Turkish, Persian, and Arabic, and likewise won the 
freedom of a Modem Western republic of letters. 3 

The Phanariot Greek Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman public 
service 4 continued to study the classical languages and literatures of the 
Islamic culture down to the eve of the Greek national uprising of a.d. 
1821, and this not merely on account of their utility, but for the sake of 
their prestige and their intrinsic attractiveness. 

'The Phanariots were attentive to education and applied themselves to 
literary studies, especially the Turkish language, as being superior to 
others,’ 

writes one of the fathers of the Greek Revolution in his memoirs. 5 But 
the qualification which gave the seventeenth-century and eighteenth- 
century Phanariots their value in the eyes of their Turkish employers 
was their familiarity, not with Ottoman, but with Western life and 
letters in an age in which the Ottoman Government had to find compe¬ 
tent representatives to negotiate diplomatically with Western Powers 
whom it cculd no longer simply defeat in the field 6 —in striking contrast 
to the Sultans’ attitude in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth cen¬ 
turies of the Christian Era, when they had conscripted an Hite of their 
Orthodox Christian subjects into their Slave-Household in order to fit 
them, by a totalitarian Ottoman education, to govern the Ottoman 
Empire as professional administrators and to extend its bounds as 
professional soldiers. 7 

The generation which saw the Ottoman Government begin to appre¬ 
ciate in their Orthodox Christian subjects a familiarity with the Modern 
West, which these ra'iyeh would not have acquired if they had been 
transformed into qullar, was likewise the generation which saw the vir¬ 
tual end of a process of voluntary conversion of Orthodox Christian 
ra'iyeh to Islam that had been in progress since the fourteenth century 
and had been one of the secrets of the ‘Osmanlis’ amazing political 
success. Even the Orthodox Christian ‘tribute children’ who were 
educated to be the rulers of the Ottoman Empire became Muslims— 
as they invariably did—by choice and not by compulsion; 8 and in 
general the Ottoman regime in the Orthodox Christian World was as 
scrupulous as the Umayyad regime had been in the Syriac World in 

1 This office had been created by the Grand Vizier Ahmed KbprGlQ in A.D. 1660. 

* This vague term 'Slav’ might mean either the ninth-century Macedonian Slav 
dialect which had become the liturgical language of the Slavonic-speaking and Rumanian¬ 
speaking Orthodox Christian peoples under the name of 'Old Slavonic', or it might 
mean one of the living vernacular Slav languages, e.g. Serbo-Croat. 

3 Mavrogordito’s contribution to Western literature was a treatise on the seventeenth- 
century Western scientific discovery of the circulation of the blood (sec p. 137, n. 8, 
below). < _ * See II. ii. 222;-8. 

3 Khrysanthdpoulos, Ph.: AtTopvrjuavtvfiaTa ntpl riji 'EMynKi/s ’Enavaordotejs 
(Athens 1899, Sakcllarios, 2 vols.), vol. i, p. 37 - 

* On this point, see II. ii. 224. 

7 The classical Ottoman system of education has been described in III. iii. 22-30. 

* See III. iii. 37 , n. x. 



164 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
abiding by the Prophet Muhammad’s injunction that non-Muslim 
'People of the Book’ were to be allowed to practise their ancestral reli¬ 
gions under Muslim rule in consideration of the payment of a surtax. 1 
After the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries a Western Chris¬ 
tian who had spent twenty-two years in captivity in Ottoman hands 
testified that the ‘Osmanlis ‘compelled no one to renounce his faith’; 1 
and, in the judgement of a judicious Modern Western student of the 
history of the Greeks under Ottoman rule, 

‘we find that many Greeks of high talent and moral character were so 
sensible of the superiority of the Mohammadans that, even when they 
escaped being drafted into the Sultan’s household as tribute-children, 
they voluntarily embraced the faith of Mahomet. The moral superiority 
of Ottoman society must be allowed to have had as much weight in causing 
these conversions, which were numerous in the fifteenth century, as the 
personal ambition of individuals.’ 3 

‘Towards the middle of the seventeenth century . . . the number of 
[Greek] renegades from among the middle and lower orders of society is 
said to have been more considerable than at any other time.’ 4 In Crete, 
the last Greek Orthodox Christian country to be acquired by the 
‘Osmanlis, the conquest achieved in the long-drawn-out Veneto-Ottoman 
War of Candia (gerebatur a . d . 1645-69) was followed by conversions 5 
which, in both their spontaneity and their numbers, were as impressive 
as any recorded in the heyday of the Ottoman Power; and the Greeks 
were not alone among the Orthodox Christian ra’iyeh in continuing to 
be susceptible to the attractions of Islam down to this date. A com¬ 
munity of Bulgar Orthodox Christian highlanders in the Rhodope, who 
came to be known, after their apostasy, as Pomaks, were converted to 
Islam between a . d . 1656 and a . d . 1661; and among the Albanians the 
proportion of Muslims in the population seems to have risen from not 
more than 10 per cent, to more than 50 per cent, between a . d . 1610 and 
the close of the seventeenth century. 6 

While the descendants of these seventeenth-century Albanian con¬ 
verts betrayed mental reservations by adopting Islam in the crypto-Shi'I 
form of Bcktashism, 7 the descendants of the contemporary Pomak and 

1 See the evidence presented in V. vi. 203-5. It is also noteworthy that, after the 
seizure, on the 4th January, 1628, by the Janissaries, at the Jesuits’ instigation, of a 
printing-press which had been brought to Constantinople from England in a.d. 1627 
by Nikbahimos Mctaxis, the Sheykh-el-Isl 4 m gave the opinion that Christian sub¬ 
jects of the Porte had a right to publish controversial religious literature. It must be 
added that this ruling did not secure the restitution of the press, though it did secure 
the temporary banishment of the Jesuits. (For this incident, see Pichler, op. cit., pp. 
127-34; Rhenibris, op. cit., pp. 43-S). During the remainder of the seventeenth century 
the only ra'iyeh permitted to have u printing press at Constantinople were the Jews. 
As late as A.D. 1698 the Armenians were estopped from using a press which they had 
imported from Venice. The first press for printing Turkish (of course, in the Arabic 
Alphabet) was established in Constantinople in a.d. 1727 by the Grand Vizier Ibrahim, 
who was a Hungarian renegade (Pichler, op. cit., pp. 137-8). 

1 AuctorAnonymua: Turchieat Spurcitiae Suggillatio et Con/ufo/io (Paris 1514, Badius), 
fol. xvii (a) in the edition of 1516, quoted in Arnold, op. cit., p. 157. 

> Finlay, op. cit., vol. v, p. 29. 

4 Arnold, op. cit., p. 165, citing Scheffler, J.: TQrchcn-Schrift: von der Unachen der 
TUrckuchen Utbtrziehung and der Zerlrelung dei Volckci Golles (1664), §§ 53-6, and Fin¬ 
lay, op. cit., vol. v, pp. 1*8-19. 

* For details, see Arnold, op. cit., pp. 153 and 201-5. 

6 See Arnold, op. cit., pp. 177-92, especially p. 180. 


7 See V. v. 295. 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 165 
Cretan converts displayed the zeal for which their kind are notorious, 
and survived to give proof of their sincerity in the twentieth century of 
the Christian Era by choosing to lose their ancestral homes and settle 
among their Turkish-speaking co-religionists in Anatolia rather than 
avoid exile by re-embracing the faith of their forefathers whose mother 
tongue they had never ceased to speak. The seventeenth-century mass 
conversions of Albanians and Rhodopaean Bulgars, however, unlike 
those of contemporary Cretans, occurred in new circumstances which 
portended a change. They appear to have been to a large extent the 
psychological reaction to a disillusionment experienced by Christian 
barbarians in fastnesses who had found their ‘Osmanli masters still too 
strong for them when they had prematurely attempted to shake off the 
Ottoman yoke by force during the temporary lapse of the Ottoman 
Empire between the death of Suleym 5 n the Magnificent in a . d . 1566 
and the advent of the saviour Mehmed Koprulii to power in a . d . 1656.* 
Thereafter, conversions virtually ceased. 

‘In the eighteenth century, when the condition of the Christians was 
worse than at any other period, we find hardly any mention of conversions 
at all, and the Turks themselves arc represented as utterly indifferent to 
the progress of their religion and considerably infected with scepticism 
and unbelief.’ 2 

The Revolution in the West's Attitude towards Orthodox Christianity 

The sufferings of the Orthodox Christian subjects of the Ottoman 
Porte in the eighteenth century of the Christian Era were due, not to 
religious persecution—as is witnessed by the fact that in this age the 
Porte’s Muslim subjects suffered equally—but to the misgovernment 
of the Ottoman Empire during its final lapse towards dissolution after the 
rally that had been led by the House of Koprulii . 3 By contrast, the 
religious scepticism and unbelief that infected Western Christendom in 
the same generation was accompanied by an advance in administrative 
efficiency and a dawn of political enlightenment. The consequent new 
Western outlook revealed itself in a sudden conversion of the Danubian 
Hapsburg Monarchy from a Spanish-minded Roman Catholic intoler¬ 
ance towards its Protestant subjects and its Orthodox Christian neigh¬ 
bours to a standard of religious toleration that could compare not 
unfavourably with the Islamic standard of a contemporary' Ottoman 
rdgime; and this moral revolution in Hapsburg counsels evoked a politi¬ 
cal revolution in Protestant and Orthodox hearts. 

‘The Calvinists of Hungary and Transylvania and the Unitarians of the 
latter country’ had 'long preferred to submit to the Turks rather than fall 
into the hands of the fanatical House of Hapsburg, and,’ as late as the 

I The insurgent Rhodopaean Bulgars were subjugated and converted bv the Grand 
Vizier Mehmed KoprillQ (fuKgebatur a.d. 1656-61). Apostasies of Roman Catholic (not 
Orthodox) Albanians on the rebound from two unsuccessful insurrections in the fourth 
and fifth decades of the seventeenth century arc noticed in Arnold, op. cit., pp. 188-9. 
While some of these Catholic apostates opted for Islam, others opted for Orthodoxy. 
The Orthodox Christian Albanian warriors who seized the fastness of Suli in the last 
quarter of the seventeenth century succeeded in holding their own till they were over¬ 
powered by ‘All Pasha of Yinnina in a.d. 1803. 

* Arnold, op. cit., p. 154. 2 See V. vi. 208-9 299-300- 



166 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

seventh decade of the seventeenth century*, ‘the Protestants of Silesia 1 
looked with longing eyes towards Turkey, and would gladly have pur¬ 
chased religious freedom at the price of submission to the Muslim rule.’ 2 

The Silesian Protestants’ pro-Ottoman proclivities evoked the follow¬ 
ing lament from a Western observer in a book published in a.d. 1664: 

‘I hear with great astonishment and consternation that it is not only 
among the common people that remarks like these go the round: "Life 
under the Turks is not so bad either; one has only to give a ducat per 
head, and one would be free”; item, "The Turk leaves religion free; one 
would recover possession of the churches”; and the like. I also hear that 
others, who ought to have known better, take pleasure in such talk and 
rejoice at the thought of their own undoing ( iiber ihr eigen Ungliick 
frolocken ).' 3 

The extent of the Danubian Hapsburg Government’s change of 
policy, if not of heart, within the next twenty-five years is revealed in 
their dealings with the Serbs 4 when, in the first rebound from the failure 
of Ottoman arms to take Vienna in the siege of a.d. 1682-3, Hapsburg 
armies broke into the domain of an Ottoman Orthodox Christendom 
and, momentarily penetrating as far south-eastward as Old Serbia, suc¬ 
ceeded in a.d. 1689 in occupying Pc<f, the seat of an autocephalous Serb 
Patriarchate that had been re-established in a.d. 1557 by the Porte at 
the instance of a Serb-born Grand Vizier, Mehmed Sdkdllii. 5 

The first reaction of the Ottoman Padishah’s Orthodox Christian sub¬ 
jects to the advent of these new schismatic Western Christian Crusaders 
was apprehensive and hostile. 

‘The most striking feature of the appeals to Russia from the Balkan 
Orthodox is that they were directed quite as much against Catholic 
Austria as against Muslim Turkey—which did not seek proselytes. The 
[orthodox] Metropolitan of Skoplje [Oskiib], who made his way to Mos¬ 
cow in a.d. 1687, inveighed against the dangers of Austrian domination 
and the ill-treatment of refugee Serbian bishops in Hungary. He was 
followed next year by Isaiah, Archimandrite of St. Paul’s Monastery on 
Athos, imploring Russia to save the Orthodox from Latin as well as 
Muslim conquerors, and bringing appeals for help not only from Constan¬ 
tinople and Sherban Cantacuzene, hospodar of Wallachia, but as well 
from Arsenius [Arscnijc III] Kmojevid, the Serbian Patriarch of Pe <5 
[Ipek ].’ 6 

Thereafter, however, a touch of adversity brought home to Franks and 
Serbs alike the expediency of making common cause. When the tide of 
war turned again in the ‘Osmanlis’ favour, as it quickly did, the reign- 

1 Silesia had come under Hapsburg rule in a.d. 1526, together with the rest of the 
Bohemian crown lands (see II. ii. 179). It remained under Hapsburg rule till all but a 
fragment of it was conquered by Frederick the Great in the War of the Austrian Suc¬ 
cession ( grrebalur A.D. 1740-8).—A.J.T. 

a Arnold, op. cit., pp. IS5-6. 

J Schcfiicr, op. cit., § 48, quoted in Arnold, op. cit., p. 156, n. 1. 

* The following account is based on Hadrovics, L.: L’£glue Serbe sous la Domination 
Turque (Paris 1947, Presses Universitaires de France), pp. 135-46. 

* See III. iii. 40, n. 1, and IV. iv. 622, n. 6. 

6 Sumner, B. H.: Peter the Great and the Ottoman Empire (Oxford 1949, Blackwell), 
P- 34 - 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 167 
ing Patriarch Arsenije III committed himself to the Hapsburg cause 
by encouraging the Serb and Albanian Orthodox Christians under his 
ecclesiastical jurisdiction to enlist under the Hapsburg flag; and on the 
6th April, 1690, on the advice of Thomas Raspassani—a Franciscan 
friar who was vicar of the vacant Roman Catholic episcopal see of Scupi 
(Skoplje, Oskub)—the Emperor Leopold published a proclamation to all 
Christian peoples formerly subject to the Hungarian Crown, and to all 
other Christian peoples now under Ottoman rule, declaring his inten¬ 
tion to liberate them, inviting them to take up arms in his cause, and 
promising them, after liberation, entire religious liberty and a juridical 
status in accordance with their desires, including the rights of freely 
electing a prince of their own and of paying no other taxes than those 
that had been in force before the Ottoman conquest. 1 This proclama¬ 
tion was accompanied by a personal letter of the same date from the 
Emperor to the Serb Patriarch. 

Later in the same year, when, under continuing Ottoman pressure, 
the Hapsburg armies were compelled to fall back on the Danube, the 
Patriarch Arsenije evacuated the abandoned territory with them at the 
head of some seventy thousand or more Serb Orthodox Christian 
refugees, 1 and a meeting of Serb prelates and lay notables, held at 
Belgrade, offered their political allegiance to the Hapsburg Crown on 
condition that in Serb-inhabited territories enumerated by them—some 
of which were at that moment in Hapsburg, and others in Ottoman, 
hands—the Hapsburg Government should guarantee to the Serb com¬ 
munity the enjoyment of a communal autonomy under the presidency 
of an archbishop of Serb descent and mother-tongue and of the Greek 
Orthodox Christian rite who was to be elected by a mixed ecclesiastical 
and lay assembly. This offer of Serb allegiance, on the basis of these 
Serb stipulations, was accepted by the Emperor Leopold in a diploma 
of the 21st August, 1690, followed up by letters patent of the 20th 
August, 1691, and a confirmatory diploma of the 4th March, 1695. 

In this political bargain between the Hapsburg Monarchy and the 
Serb refugees in territory under Hapsburg rule, what the Serbs were 
demanding and the Monarchy was granting in substance was that an 
Orthodox Christian people under the dominion, and in the territory, of 
a Western Power should continue to enjoy a non-territorial communal 
autonomy on the temporal as well as the ecclesiastical plane which it had 
previously enjoyed as a millet of the Ottoman Empire, 3 but which was at 
variance with the Modern Western political principle of territorial 

1 This undiscriminating appeal by a representative of one Christian denomination 
to representatives of all Christian denominations was a new departure in Western 
history, and it is significant that the cue thus given in a.D. 1690 by a Catholic Hapsburg 
Emperor was followed by an Orthodox Romanov Emperor in A.D. 17x1. In the pro¬ 
clamation to the Ottoman Christians which Peter the Great issued in March 1711, on 
the eve of his invasion of Moldavia (sec p. 127, n. 3, above), the Tsar, like his Caesarean 
Majesty, ‘came forward avowedly as the liberator of the Christians, Catholic as well as 
Orthodox’ (Sumner, op. cit., p. 46). A professedly ‘enlightened’ Russia that had entered 
the field as Austria’s competitor in a race for the acquisition of the Ottoman Empire’s 
heritage in South-East Europe was under double pressure not to fall below a Hapsburg 
standard of religious toleration. 

» Hadrovics estimates the number at 70,000-100,000 in op. cit., p. 140, n. r. 

J For this Ottoman institution, sec pp. 184-6, below. 



168 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
sovereignly. In virtue of thus bringing themselves, in despite of their 
own traditions, to be as liberal as their Ottoman adversaries had been 
towards an Orthodox Christian people for whose allegiance they were 
now competing, the Hapsburgs succeeded in winning the refugee Serbs’ 
loyalty; 1 * * and, in the sequel, these Serb Orthodox Christian subjects of 
the Hapsburg Monarchy living in Hungary and in the Militargrcnzen* 
under their traditional Ottoman communal constitution became the 
psychologically conductive medium through which the Modern Western 
culture penetrated the Serb people as a whole. 


Channels of Western Cultural Penetration into an Ottoman Orthodox 
Christendom 

What were the geographical channels through which this Modern 
Western cultural influence seeped into the main body of Orthodox 
Christendom ? 

The oldest channel was the fraction of Orthodox Christian territory 
remaining under Venetian rule in the Levant, which played the same 
part in the relations between the main body of Orthodox Christendom 
and the Modern West as was played in the relations between a Russian 
Orthodox Christendom and the Modern West by the Russian Orthodox 
Christian territories under the sovereignty of Poland-Lithuania. 5 Crete, 
for example, by the date of the fall of Candia in a.d. 1669, had been 
under Venetian rule for more than 450 years 4 —a length of tenure which, 
in the records of Modem Western colonial empires down to the year 
a.d. 1952, had been surpassed only by Portugal, and this only in her 
possessions in and off the west coast of Africa. 5 During the Early 
Modern chapter that was the last chapter in the history of Venetian rule 
in Crete, the strength of the Modern Western cultural influence on the 
local Greek Orthodox Christian population was revealed by their produc¬ 
tion of a literature in the contemporary Western vein in a Modern 
Greek linguistic dress; and it is significant that not only the Italianatc 
Modern Greek painter Dhommikos Thcotokdpoulos, alias ‘El Greco’ 
[vivebat a.d. 1541-1614), 6 but the Calvinistic Modem Greek Oecumeni¬ 
cal Patriarch Kyrillos Lotikaris ( vivebat a.d. 1572-1638), was born in 
Crete as a Venetian subject. 7 

The cutting off of this Cretan line of cultural communications be- 

1 On the other hand, ns late as a.d. 1698, George Kastridtis, an envoy from the Hos- 
podar of Wallachia to Moscow, was writing to Mazepa, the Hetman of the Ukraine, 
who was at this date in the Muscovite camp: ‘We all pray with tears for the Sovereign 
Monarch [Peter the Great] to save us from the Papists and Jesuits, who rage against 
the Orthodox more than against the Turks and Jews . . . The secular war may finish 
some time, but the Jesuit war never.’ This extract from Kastridtis’ letter is quoted by 
Sumner, B. H.: Peter the Great and the Ottoman Empire (Oxford 1950, Blackwell), p. 34. 

1 For these Militiirgrenzen, see V. v. 462-3 and VI. vii. 117. 

J See pp. 128-9, above. 

* The effective occupation of Crete by the Venetians had begun in a.d. 1212. 

* The Portuguese had discovered the Cape Verde Islands in a . d . 1456 and Angola in 

A.D. 1484. The Spanish as well as the Portuguese colonial empire would, of course, have 
to be dated back a hundred years earlier than that if the Azores, Madeira, and the 
Canaries were to be reckoned as colonial acquisitions and not as extensions of Portugal’s 
and Spain’s metropolitan territories. 6 See IV. iv. 360-1. 

7 See Pichler, op. cit., p. 37; Rhenidris, op. cit., p. 4. 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 169 
tween Greek Orthodox Christendom and the Modern West through the 
Ottoman conquest of Crete in a.d. 1645-69 was partially offset by the 
Venetian conquest of the Morea in a.d. 1684-99, which brought under 
Venetian rule a larger Greek Orthodox Christian population than had 
been lost to Venice in her successive forfeitures of territory to the 
Ottoman Empire between a.d. 1463 and a.d. 1669.’ Though these 
Venetian acquisitions in Continental Greece were reconquered by the 
‘Osmanlis in a.d. 1715, an ephemeral political episode had lasting cul¬ 
tural effects 2 because the Venetian Signoria had experienced, between 
a.d. 1669 and a.d. 1684, the same rather sudden change of heart that 
overtook the Hapsburg Monarchy in the same generation. The griev¬ 
ances of Venice’s Moreot subjects during their thirty years’ experience 
of Venetian rule at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 
were not religious but fiscal and economic. 1 Orthodox Christian pupils 
were free to attend the schools and colleges founded by the Venetians in 
the Morea* during an occupation of the peninsula which, so long as it 
lasted, made it impossible for an obscurantist Oecumenical Patriarch, 
as well as for his more tolerant master the Ottoman Padishah, to exercise 
his jurisdiction over the Moreots; and the Moreot Greek municipal 
institutions, which were so important a factor in the Greek uprising of 
a.d. 1821 and in the subsequent establishment of an independent Greek 
national state on a Western pattern, were in part a legacy of a system of 
municipal government that had been introduced into the Morea during 
this Venetian occupation on the model of the contemporary regime in 
the North Italian city-states under Venetian hegemony, though they 
were also in part a gradual and undesigned product of the Ottoman 
practice of tax-farming. 5 

After the Morea and Tinos had gone the same way in a.d. 1715 as 
Crete in a.d. 1669 and Cyprus in a.d. 1571 and Negrepont in a.d. 1474, 
a remnant of Greek Orthodox Christian population still remained under 
Venetian rule in the Ionian Islands. The Ionian Islanders, who were 
subject to a culturally alien political domination from the twelfth and 

» See IV. iv. 279. 

i This Venetian occupation of the Morea, and the contemporary and subsequent 
Hapsburg occupation of Serbia, have been cited in another context (in V. v. 63778) 
as examples of ephemeral intrusions, on the part of Modem Western empires, which 
had been followed, after an equally ephemeral restoration of an anaen rtgwit, , by the 
establishment, in the same territory, of a parochial national state on the Modem 

j'see $nUy!op. cit., vol. v, pp. 208-9. According to Sakellarios, M. V.: 'Hntlovov- 
\moos Kara Atvripav TovpKOKfxncav (1715-^21) (Athena 1939, Byzantinisch- 
Neugriechischcn JahrbQcher), pp. 121-2, the Venetians had killed Moreot Greek com¬ 
merce and, though they had encouraged agriculture in the Morea, they had prohibited the 
export of the produce (except for wine) to foreign markets. Their financial policy in the 
Morea had created a currency famine there (see ibid., p. 126). After the Ottoman recon¬ 
quest of the Morea in A.D. 1715, the trade of the country was thrown open to all nations, 
and production in the Morea increased (see ibid., pp. 124-5). These financial and econo¬ 
mic considerations explain why it was that in a.d. 1715 the; Greek Orthodox Christian 
population of the Morea sided with the Turks against the Venetians (see ibid., p. 41). 
At the same time, Leondiri was the only place in the Morea whew the Turkish re¬ 
conquest in a.d. 1715 was followed by conversions to Islam in appreciable numbers (see 
ibid., p. H7>—in contrast to the religious sequel to the Turkish conquest of Candia in 
a.d. 1669 (see p. 164, above). 

* See Finlay, op. cit., vol. v, p. 212. 

s Sec Finlay, op. cit., vol. v, pp. 197-9. 

B 2898. vm 


G 2 



170 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

thirteenth centuries 1 to a.d. 1864,* were unique in being the only Greek 
Orthodox Christians to be visited with an almost unbroken succession 
of Western masters; 3 and the Venetian landowners who constituted the 
Western ‘ascendancy’ here were likewise unique, for their part, in having 
become converts from their ancestral Roman Catholic Christianity to 
the Orthodoxy of the local Greek peasantry without having become 
apostates from their ancestral Western culture, and in having learnt to 
communicate with their agricultural labourers, tenants, body servants, 
and mistresses in the local Romaic Greek vernacular without having 
abandoned their traditional use of Italian as the exclusive language of 
polite society and exclusive linguistic medium for education and literary 
composition. The death-knell of this remote outpost of a Western 
ancien regime was sounded by the French Revolution; yet, before the 
merger of an old Ionian landowning aristocracy in a new democratic 
Greek nation was expedited by the union of the Hcptancse with the 
Kingdom of Greece in a.d. 1864, these seven diminutive plots of com¬ 
mon ground between the two Christendoms had given birth to two 
islanders who each played an eminent part in the transmission of a 
Modern Western culture to an Ottoman Orthodox Christendom. The 
first of the two was the Corfiot Greek Westernizing philosopher-educa¬ 
tionalist Evy&iios Voiilgharis (vivebat a.d. 1716-1806)/ who was born 
a Venetian subject. The second was the Zantiot Italian aristocrat- 
poetaster Count Dionisio Salomone (vivebat a.d. 1798-1857), who died 
under a British protectorate after having won fame in the West, as well 
as in a Greek Orthodox Christendom, as the great Greek poet Dhionysios 
Solomos. 5 

Even in the Early Modern Age of religious faith and fanaticism, 
Venice had been appreciably less intolerant than most contemporary 
Western states/ either Catholic or Protestant. The Signoria was no 
friend of the Society of Jesus; at the University of Padua, which served 
the Venetian dominions, there was a relative freedom of philosophical 
thought; 7 it had become customary for Cretans to seek a higher educa¬ 
tion there; 8 and colleges for Greek students were founded at both Padua 
and Venice between a.d. 1590 and a.d. 1642/ Cyril Loukaris’ kinsman 

* Corfii was seized by the Genoese pirate Vefrano in a.d. 1199 and by the Venetians 
in a.d. 1206, but was recovered in a.d. 1214, and held till A.D. 1259, by the Epirot Greek 
successor-state of the East Roman Empire, before being permanently annexed to West¬ 
ern Christendom by Manfred of Sicily. Ccfalonia and Zante were seized by the Sicilian 
Normans area a.d. 118 s. 

1 The date at which Great Britain renounced her protectorate and allowed the Ionian 
Islanders to fulfil their desire for union with the Kingdom of Greece. 

J This succession was technically broken during the years A.D. 1800-7, when the 
Ionian Islanders were autonomous under a Russo-Ottoman protectorate. In the heyday 
of the Ottoman Power the 'Osmanlis had succeeded occasionally in occupying some of 
the islands temporarily without ever managing to confirm their hold. 

« See pp. j 60-1, above. . _ _ J Sec pp. 670-80, below. 

4 Rhenidris, op. cit., p. 4, points out the significance of this fact in the present 
context. 

7 'Padua fell under the rule of Venice from A.D. 1404, and Venice was the most success¬ 
fully anti-clerical state in Europe both at this time and for long afterwards. The freedom 
of thought enjoyed by Padua attracted the ablest men, not only from the whole of the 
Italian Peninsula, but also from the rest of Europe—William Hcrvcy . . . being a con¬ 
spicuous example of this' (Butterfield, II.: The Origins of Modern Science, 1300-1800 
(London 1949, Bell), p. 43)- Sc« also Mettetal, op. cit., p. 19. 

* See Rhemdris, op. cit., p. 5. 9 Sec Pichler, op. cit, p. 40. 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 171 
and patron Meletios Pighis, the Orthodox Patriarch of Alexandria, had 
studied in Venice, but had been debarred from taking a degree by his 
refusal to subscribe to Roman Catholic doctrine and recognize Papal 
supremacy, and had acquired in consequence a strong animus against 
the Roman Church . 1 Meletios nevertheless sent Loukaris, in his turn, 
to Venice for his education at the age of twelve ; 1 and, after spending four 
years there, Loiikaris went on to spend seven further years as a student 
at Padua . 3 Lodkaris’ younger contemporary and outstanding opponent 
Meletios Syrighos ( natus a.d. 1585) was likewise a Cretan and likewise 
an alumnus of the University of Padua, where he studied mathematics, 
physics, and medicine ; 4 but the privilege of studying in the Venetian 
University of Padua was not confined to Greek Orthodox Christians 
who were Venetian subjects. At Padua Loukaris made friends with his 
fellow student Nikiphdros Korydhalldfs of Athens , 5 who in a.d. 1624, 
after Loukaris had become Oecumenical Patriarch, was to open at 
Constantinople a school of a Calvinist complexion 6 and was to be 
anathematized, like Loukaris himself, after Lodkaris’ final fall and 
death . 7 The Chiot Alexander Mavrogorddto, too, studied medicine at 
Padua 8 like the Cretan Syrighos, though, like the Athenian Korydhallcfs, 
he was an Ottoman subject. 

Another channel through which Modern Western influence flowed 
into the main body of Orthodox Christendom was the Western diplo¬ 
matic corps at Constantinople, which became a force there during the 
eclipse of the Ottoman Power after the death of Suleyman the Magnifi¬ 
cent in a.d. 1566. During the Thirty Years’ War (gerebatur a.d. 1618-48) 
Constantinople, like Berne during the general War of a.d. 1914-18 and 
Lisbon during the general war of a.d. 1939-45, was a theatre of diplo¬ 
matic hostilities on militarily neutral ground, and the diplomatic contest 
that centred on the person of Cyril Loukaris has been described as a 
repercussion of the contemporary struggle between Roman Catholicism 
and Protestantism in the West . 9 The Dutch, English, Swedish, and 
Venetian ambassadors were in league, at the time when Loukaris 
ascended the Oecumenical Throne, against their Hapsburg and French 
confreres , 10 and Loukaris’ intimacy with the Protestant diplomatic circles 
in his see brought him not only local Western political patronage but 
widespread Western cultural contacts—as is testified by his correspon¬ 
dence with the Dutch theologian Uytenbogaert and the Dutch states¬ 
man David le Leu dc Wilhem. 

• See Pichler, op. cit.. p. 41. * See Pichler, op. cit., p. 4 °- 

J See Pichler, op. cit., pp. 45 and 49 - 4 See Pich er, op. cit., p. 20S. 

s See Pichler. op. cit., p. 47 - 6 See Pichler. op. cit., p. « 43 - 

7 Korydhalltfs was anathematized by the Constantinopolitan Orthodox Church tor 
objecting to the use of the Greek word utrovoiajois as a translation of the Latin word 
transsubstaniiatio (Pichler. op. cit.. p. 221). 

8 The monument of Alexander Mavrogordito’s studies at Padua was a Herveian trea¬ 
tise in Latin on the circulation of the blood: Pncumaticwn Instrumentum Ctradandi 
Sanguinis, site de Motu el Usu Pulmonum Dissertatio Philosophtco-medica, Aulhore 
AUxandro Mavrocordato Constantinopolitano, Philosophiae el MedutnaeDoclore (Bologna 

other edition was published at Frankfurt in A.D. 
E.: Bibliographic HelUnique, ou Description Raison- 
au Dix-Septtimc SUcle, vol. ii (Paris 1894, Picard), 

PP i See"]Rheniiris, op. cit., p. 30- 10 Sec PichIer » op. cit., p. 113. 


1664, Typographia Fcrromana). An 
166s by T. M. Goetz (See Legrand, 
nie des Outrages Publics par des Grecs 


172 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
Thereafter, when the rally of the Ottoman Power under the leadership 
of the House of Kopriilu was followed by a final lapse into dissolution, 
the classic Ottoman political principle of non-territorial autonomy for all 
communities in the Empire, not excluding resident aliens,' enabled the 
embassies of Western Powers in Constantinople to erect themselves into 
miniature imperia in imperio reigning, not only over their own nationals 
in Ottoman territory, but also over Ottoman subjects who were their 
official proteges. The germs of these Western protectorates can be 
detected in some of the provisions of the capitulations granted to 
England by the Porte in September 1675/ and in the Hapsburg- 
Ottoman capitulatory treaty of the 27th July, 1718. 3 In the capitulations 
granted to France in May 1740 these germs blossomed into a provision 
authorizing the French Ambassador to maintain fifteen Ottoman subjects 
as his servants free from taxation * After the Great Russo-Turkish War 
of a.d. 1768-74, which was a milestone in the course of the Ottoman 
Empire’s decline, this privilege of exercising a protectorate over Otto¬ 
man subjects was extended to other capitulatory Powers, and the Porte 
presented each embassy with a certain number of blank ‘certificates of 
denaturalization’ (as the Ottoman term herd'at might be interpreted in 
this context), which the ambassadors were then free to bestow upon 
Ottoman subjects of their own choice. 5 

The Western embassies were more successful in abusing this privilege 6 
than the Porte was in its belated attempts to restrict its scope. 7 The 
consequence was that an appreciable number of Greek Orthodox 
Christian and other Ottoman subjects came to participate in the fiscal 
privileges that gave the nationals of capitulatory Powers a decisive 
advantage over non-privileged Ottoman subjects in the now increasingly 
important trade between the Ottoman Empire and the West ; 8 and this 
made Ottoman subjects engaged in foreign trade so eager to obtain the 
official protection of foreign governments that, shortly before the year 
1824, 9 the Ottoman Government sought to reduce this incentive by 
granting ‘most favoured foreign nation treatment’ to Ottoman subjects 
trading with foreign countries who were not the official proteges of 
foreign embassies. 10 

1 This principle and the institutions in which it was embodied arc examined on pp. 
184-6. below. 

1 Arts. 28, 45, and 59. 3 Art. 5. 

4 Ait. 47. In the same instrument the incipient rights of protectorate already secured 
by England and the Hapsburg Monarchy were conferred on France likewise in Aits. 
13 . 43 . 45 . 46, and 50. 

J bee Finlay, op. cit., vol. vj, p. 107. 

* See d’Ohsson, I. M.: Tableau Udniral dt VEmpire Ottoman (Paris 1788-1824, 
Didot, 7 vols.), vol. vii, pp. 506-8. 

1 Such attempts were made in the Anglo-Turkish peace treaty of the 6th January, 
1809, Art. 9, and in the American-Turkish commercial treaty of the 7 th May, 1830, 
Art. e. 

* Sec d’Ohsson, op. cit., vol. vii, pp. 235 and 239. 

9 shortly before the publication of the last volume of d’Ohsson’s work in that 
year. 

1® Sec d’Ohsson, op. cit., vol. vii, p. 509. The two principal benefits thereby extended 
to non-protected Ottoman subjects were the issue of certificates of privilege and the 
limitation of the rate of customs duties payable by them to the 3 per cent, ad valorem 
which was at that time the maximum rate payable by the nationals and the Ottoman 
prot 6 gis of the capitulatory Powers. The first instrument in which a definite rate of 
customs duty ad valorem was fixed by mutual agreement would appear to have been the 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 173 

This was a striking inversion of a stipulation in the Franco-Turkish 
capitulatory treaty of February, 1535,' that French merchants were to 
pay no higher duties than Ottoman subjects. That treaty was the arche¬ 
type of all instruments, bilateral or unilateral, conferring capitulatory 
privileges in the Ottoman Empire on Modern Western Powers and their 
nationals; and Ottoman subjects had indeed profited at the expense of 
Westerners, in the competition for the profits of the maritime trade in 
the Mediterranean, as a result of the political union of the main body 
of Orthodox Christendom with the greater part of the Arabic World 
under Ottoman rule at the beginning of the Modem Age of Western 
history. 

The first commercial effect of this political revolution in the Levant 
had been to strike a deadly blow at the commerce of Venice, 2 Genoa, and 
the other North Italian communities that had been progressively wrest¬ 
ing the maritime commerce of the Mediterranean out of Greek hands 
since the eleventh century of the Christian Era; and, though the Greeks 
too had been hard hit, economically as well as politically, by the Ottoman 
conquest, 1 while all participants in the Mediterranean maritime trade 
had suffered alike from a conquest of the Ocean by West European 
peoples who had thereby turned the Mediterranean into a backwater, 4 
the Greek subjects of the Porte found themselves, as a result of the 
Ottoman conquest, in a stronger position for competing with the Franks 
in the Mediterranean trade, even before they came to benefit from the 
commercial privileges which the Modern Western Great Powers were 
granted by the Porte from a.d. 1673 onwards. 5 The maritime trade via 
the Mediterranean, on which the ‘Osmanlis’ Greek subjects thus secured 
and maintained a hold, was another channel through which Western 
cultural influences seeped into the main body of Orthodox Christendom, 6 
and the cultural intercourse became more active as the Mediterranean 
came back to commercial life at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth 
centuries. 7 Colonics of Ottoman Greek merchants were to be found in 

capitulations granted to France on the 5th June, 1673. In this instrument, Additional 
Article 5, it is laid down that import and export duties payable by French merchants are 
to be reduced from 5 per cent., at which they had previously stood, to 3 per cent. 

' Article 3. 

a In the eighteenth century the Greek subjects of Venice in the Ionian Islands pre¬ 
ferred to trade under the Ottoman flag (Sakellarios, op. cit., p. 128). 

3 The greatest single economic blow that was dealt to the Greeks by their Ottoman 
conquerors was the settlement of Sephardi Jewish refugees from the Iberian Peninsula 
in the chief commercial centres of the Ottoman Empire—e.g. Salonica, Adrianople, 
Constantinople—to fill an economic vacuum created by the expulsion of the major part 
of the former Greek population of these cities (sec II. ii. 245-6). 

* Chios, for example, was hit by this diversion of the main channel of world trade 
(Argenti, P, P.: Chius Vircta (Cambridge, 1941. University Press), pp. xli-xlii). From 
the sixteenth century to circa a . d . 1791 the Chiots’ main economic activities were 
agriculture and manufactures, not commerce (David, C. E., French Vice-Consul at 
Chios: Dispatch dated 14th June, 1824 = Ministire des Affaires Etrangires, Paris, 
Correspondance Consulaire de Scio. 1812-25 D-, No. 39 bl * enclosing 'Mdmoire sur 
Scio’: printed in Argenti, P. P.: The Massacres of Chios described in Contemporary 
Diplomatic Documents (London 1932, Lane), pp. 52-95, especially p. 67). 

s For this date, sec p. 172, n. to, above. 

6 The Chiots, for example, went to the West first in order to do business, but after¬ 
wards also in order to obtain a Western education (David, op. cit., p. 78). 

2 The Mediterranean did not, of course, recover the position that it hud held before 
the Oceanic Age; the Ocean continued to be the principal medium of communication 
for a World that had been united by the Oceanic enterprise of West European peoples; 



174 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
the Mediterranean ports of Western Christendom as early as the six¬ 
teenth century ; 1 and the notable increase in the trade between the 
Ottoman Empire and a geographically expanding Western World which 
declared itself towards the end of the eighteenth century was marked by 
the establishment of Greek commercial colonies in London, Liverpool, 
Manchester, and New York as well as in Venice, Leghorn, Marseilles, 
and Trieste . 1 These Greek settlements in partibus Occidentalium came 
to act like lenses which focused the cultural influence of the West and 
transmitted it to the Levant in concentrated rays of a high degree of 
potency. 

The economic and consequent cultural opportunities opened up to 
Greek Ottoman subjects by this revival of maritime trade between the 
Levant and the West via the Mediterranean were made the most of by a 
few maritime Ottoman communities that enjoyed some measure of local 
autonomy, whether by charter or by custom or merely by oversight. 1 
The outstanding chartered communities were the mastic-growing island 
of Chios, the olive-growing peninsula of Ayvalyq (Kydhonies), 4 and the 
two continental Greek portlets of Ghalaxtdhi 5 on the Gulf of Corinth and 
Trikdri 6 commanding the entrance to the Gulf of Volo. Among the 
communities that benefited by custom or oversight were the previously 
derelict Aegean islands Hydhra 7 and Pdtses, 8 off the coast of the Argolid, 
which were colonized in the eighteenth century by Orthodox Christian 


but in the course of the eighteenth century the Mediterranean did begin to change from 
being a mere backwater in an Oceanic system of waterways into becoming a through- 
route between the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean which had the advantage of being a 
short cut. This rehabilitation of the Mediterranean was consummated by the opening 
of the Suez Canal in a.d. 1869 (sec IV. iv. 23), but the process had begun at least a hun¬ 
dred years before that. One cause of it was the progressive establishment of British rule 
in India, beginning with Bengal, which led the British to search for a shorter and quicker 
route between England and India than the Oceanic route via the Cape of Good Hope 
(sec Hoskins, H. L.: British Routes to India (London 1928, Longmans Green)). A second 
cause was the opening up of a new continental hinterland to the Mediterranean through 
the replacement of Nomadism by the sedentary civilization of Russian Orthodox 
Christendom in the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe along the north coast of 
the Black Sea as a consequence of the Russian victory in the Russo-Turkish War of 
a.d. 1768-74 (see III. iii. 428). A third cause was the Westernization of Egypt, which 
was initiated by the French military invasion in a.d. 1798. 

1 See Finlay, op. cit., vol. v, p. 156. 

1 The Chiots, for example, who appear to have had no permanent commercial 
establishments abroad before a.d. 1780, began to settle in Western and Russian maritime 
and commercial entrepfits from about that date onwards. Two members of the Ralli 
family can be traced as far back as a.d. 17S0 in Leghorn; and there was an Avierino at 
Taganrog by a.d. 1795; “ Zarakhnni and a Zizinia at the same Russian port in a.d. 1805; 
a Kapparis at Theodosia and a Rhodhokandkis at Genoa by the same year; an Argcnti. a 
Psyknas, and a Ralli at Amsterdam by a.d. 1810; a Galatti and a Psykhas at Isma'il by 
the same year; and an Argcnti at Marseilles by A.D. 1818 (Argcnti, The Massacres of 
Chios, p. xxiv, n. 1). After the catastrophe of A.D. 1822, Chiot refugees founded further 
colonics in Constantinople, Egypt, the new dominions of Russia along the north coast 
of the Black Sea, Leghorn, Trieste, Vienna, Marseilles. Paris, London, Liverpool, 
Manchester, and the Lnited States of America (ibid., pp. xxiii-xxiv; cp. Chius Vincia, p. 
cxcviii). Chiot emigrants seem to have been quicker than other Greek emigrants to adapt 
themselves to the Western way of life (Chius Vincia. p. exxi). Committees for raising 
funds for education in Chios were organized by the Chiot diaspora in Trieste, Leghorn, 
Marseilles. Paris. London, Liverpool, and Manchester (ibid., p. ccxvi). 

J See II. ii. 262. * For Ayvalyq, sec II, ii. 40, n. 1. 

-* See Finlay, op. cit., vol. v, p. 281, and vol. vi, p. 167. 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 175 
Albanians from the Morea, and Kdsos 1 and Psar&, 2 in the Sporades, 
which were colonized in the same age by Orthodox Christian Greeks.* 

The attraction of these barren islands, and of the stony peninsula of 
Ayvalyq, was a hope of escaping the increasing fiscal oppression under 
which the Orthodox Christian settlers on these uninviting spots had 
been suffering in their previous homes in an age when a declining 
Ottoman Power was no longer able to protect its subjects against its 
agents. The colonist-islanders—who had to fling themselves on the sea 
as their only alternative to starvation—found favour with an Ottoman 
Government that in this age was eager to foster a native maritime popu¬ 
lation both as a counter-move in the commercial field to Western 
encroachments on Ottoman commerce and as a reservoir in the military 
field for the man-power of an Ottoman Navy on the Modern Western 
model. 

The Qapudan Pasha Hiiseyn Jezayrli, who as Grand Admiral was ex 
officio governor of the Archipelago and the Mani, 4 had no fewer than 

1 Sec Finlay, op. cit., vol. vi, p. 166. 

» See Finlay, op. cit., vol. v, p. 281, and vol. vi, p. 167. 

1 The autonomy enjoyed by these maritime Ottoman Greek communities that turned 
it to commercial account was shared by a number of highland communities, most of 
which also adjoined the sea. We may notice the MAni in the Morea; SphakiA in Crete; 
and KhimArrha, the Armatoli of Pindus and the Agrapha, the Elefterokhdria, Mount 
Athos, the Pclion ZagorA and the Dhervenokhdria in Rumili. Of these all but the Mini, 
SphakiA, and KhimArrha were officially recognized by the Porte. 

The Mini was independent dtjacio till a.d. 1670, the year after the Ottoman conquest 
of Candia (Finlay, op. cit., vol. v, pp. 116-17); ,n that year it was compelled to receive 
Ottoman garrisons and to pay kharfii; in a.d. 1685 it made a pact with Venice through 
which it secured autonomy under Venetian rule (Finlay, op. cit., vol. v, p. 205). After 
the Ottoman reconquest of the Morea in a.d. 1715, the Maniots retained their autonomy 
but were compelled to resume payment of kharfij. They joined the Russians when these 
invaded the Morea in a.d. 1770 (Finlay, op. cit., vol. v, pp. 252-3), and reacknowledged 
the sovereignty of the Porte in a.d. 1777. In A.D. 1S03-4 they were again brought to 
heel by the Ottoman authorities after they had flirted with the French (Sakcllarios, op. 
cit., pp. 236-7). In a.d. i82r their chieftain Petrobcy gave the signal for the Greek 
national uprising by attacking the Ottoman garrison of MistrA. 

SphakiA was compelled to pay khnrSj in a.d. 1770 (Finlay, op. cit., vol. v. pp. xii and 
263). Its autonomy was respected in practice by the Porte thereafter (Finlay, op. cit., 
vol. vi, p. 4). 

The Khimarrhiots made the living that they could not wring out of the rocks of Acro- 
ccraunus by serving as mercenaries in the armies of Venice and Naples (see Mozart’s Cosi 
Fan Tulli, lutum a.d. 1790). 

The Armatoli have been noticed already in another context in V. v. 297-8* 

The Elcftcrokhdria were three confederations of villages on the Peninsula of Khalkid- 
hikl which governed themselves and collected their own taxes under the superintendence 
of an Ottoman resident backed by a token military force (Finlay, op. cit., vol. vi p. 202). 

Mount Athos (’the Holy Mountain’) was an autonomous federal republic of Orthodox 
Christian monasteries, including representatives of most of the Orthodox Christian 
nationalities, though the Greeks had a great preponderance. Here too the Porte %vaa 
represented merely by a resident (Finlav, op. cit., vol. vi, pp. 203-4). 

The ZagorA ( Slavicf ‘Among the Mountains’) was a cluster of densely populated 
Greek Orthodox Christian villages running up the western flank of Mount Pelion over¬ 
looking the Plain of Thessaly. Its autonomy was recognized by the Porte and ad¬ 
ministered by elective magistrates (Finlay, op. cit., vol. vi, pp. 200-1). 

The Dhervcnokhdria were five Albanian Orthodox Christian tillages, mustering two 
thousand fighting men, who were commissioned by the Porte to police the overland 
route between Rumili and the Morea over Mount Cithseron and Mount Gcraneia 
(Finlay, op. cit., vol. vi, p. 30). . 

* The QapudAn Pasha administered this governorship through the agency of his 
Phanariot Greek Orthodox Christian aecretary the Drtgoman of the Fleet (sec d’Ohsson, 
I. M.: Tableau GMral de VEmpire Ottoman (Paris 1788-1824, 7 vols.), vol. vu (Paris 
1824, Didot), p. 431, and Finlay, op. cit., vol. v, p. 242). The Mani had been separated 
administratively from the Morea, and been added to the Qapudan Pasha’s domain, after 



176 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
two hundred Hydhriot sailors serving on board his flagship in a.d. 1797, 
and this service won for Hydhra valuable privileges. In a.d. 1802 the 
Qapud 3 n Pasha appointed a native Hydhriot Christian governor, and 
the taxes payable by the island to the Porte were commuted for a contin¬ 
gent of 250 men to the fleet and a gratuity to the Qapudan Pasha and his 
staff. 1 The same boons of local self-government and light taxation were 
granted to P< 5 tscs, Kdsos, and Psar& on the same considerations. Under 
these exceptionally favourable conditions the four islands and the two 
continental portlets developed a merchant marine which earned high, 
though short-lived, profits during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic 
Wars (gerebantur a.d. 1792-1815), when the Ottoman flag was the only 
neutral flag left in the Mediterranean; and the lion’s share of the trade 
carried on under this flag was secured by this handful of Ottoman 
Orthodox Christian maritime communities. 2 This windfall from a storm 
in the neighbouring Western World ceased to drop into these Ottoman 
Greek mariners’ hands as soon as the Western peoples emerged from 
their Napoleonic bout of fratricidal warfare; 3 and the unemployment, 
distress, and discontent arising from the rapid decline in the volume of 
their commercial business after a.d. 1815 made these communities ready, 

a.d. 1777, when it had reacknowledgcd the sovereignty of the Porte, which had been in 
abeyance there since the Russian descent on the Morea in a.d. 1770 (Finlay, op. cit., 
vol. v, pp. 265-6). 

1 See Finlay, op. cit., vol. v, p. 283, and vol. vi, pp. 32-33. 

2 See Sakcllarios, op. cit., pp. 212-15. In this lucrative but ephemeral Ottoman Greek 
trade the Chiots found a leading role to play. About the year A.D. 1780 their manufac¬ 
tures—of which the most valuable was a silk industry inherited from the period of 
Genoese rule—had succumbed to Western industrial competition; but, after the out¬ 
break of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars in the West, Chiot capitalists financed 
the Hydhriot, Pctaiot, and Psariot merchant marine that was earning profits by carrying 
grain, oil, and other produce of the Ottoman Empire from Anatolia, Salonica, and Egypt 
to the ports of the Napoleonic French Empire. The Chiots then established business 
houses at Marseilles, Trieste, and Leghorn (see p. 179, n. 2, above) to correspond with 
their houses at Constantinople, Salonica, and above all at Smyrna, where Chiot enter¬ 
prise had made an entrepflt for the exchange of Western manufactures with the products 
of the interior of Anatolia. After the annexation of Croatia to the French Empire in a.d. 
1809, the Chiots took part, from their commercial bases in Salonica and Smyrna, in an 
overland trade which the French proceeded to open up via Bosnia with the Ottoman 
World. From Constantinople, Chiot merchants exported cloth to Austria. Chios made 
her fortune in twenty years (David, op. cit., pp. 67-70). 

Even the hitherto almost exclusively agrarian Ottoman Greek community in the 
Morea shared in this temporary commercial prosperity. When the liquidation of the 
Venetian dominion over the Morea in a.d. 1715 had been followed by the collapse of 
the local Venetian commercial supremacy, the Venetian commercial heritage in the Morea 
had been captured, not by the Moreot Greeks, but by the French (see Sakcllarios, op. 
cit., pp. 126-8). The cereal* exported from the Morea had all been shipped to Marseilles, 
while the currant crop had been shipped to Great Britain and Holland (ibid., pp. 128 
and 210). There is no record of Greek merchants participating in the trade of the Morea 
before the foundation of a commercial company by Bcndki of Kalamita in a.d. 1761 
(ibid., pp. 128-0). The French traders in the Morea were, however, ruined by the 
abortive Greek Christian insurrection and retaliatory Albanian Muslim barbarian con¬ 
quest in a.d. 1770-9 (ibid., p. 216); what remained of the eighteenth-century trade 
through a French channel was paralysed by the outbreak of the French Revolution 
(ibid., p. 212); and, when the Napoleonic Wars offered their golden opportunity to 
neutral Ottoman carriers, Moreot landowners, Turkish as well as Greek, stepped into 
the ruined French merchants’ shoes (ibid.,pp. 211, 218, and 244). 

3 This commercial stagnation after a.d. 1815 made itself felt in Chios as well as in the 
seafaring Greek islands (David, op. cit., p. 71). Yet the trade between Chios and the 
West nevertheless remained so important that the catastrophe of a.d. 1822 was reported 
by the Hapsburg Intcmuncio at Constantinople to have been severely felt in many towns 
in Germany, France, Italy, and England (Argcnti, P. P.: The Massacres of Chios, pp. 
xv-xvi and 127). 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 177 
in a.d. 1821, to join in a Greek national insurrection—inspired by 
Western political ideas—which held out hopes for them of replacing 
the dwindling profits of trade by the spoils of buccaneering. 1 

In the Westernization of the main body of Orthodox Christendom 
through the maritime channel, a particularly important part was played 
by the Greek island of Chios, which had been under Western rule for 
just about two and a half centuries by the date of its annexation to the 
Ottoman Empire in a.d. 1566, 2 and which retained both its Western 
political constitution 5 and its Western cultural complexion 4 under 

• Statistics of the number of families, and the number of ships of a tonnage of over 
a hundred tons, to be found at Hy-dhra, PAtses, KAsos, Psari, Ghalaxldhi, and TrikAri 
in a.d. 1 Sax, on the eve of the Greek uprising of that year, are given in Finlay, op. cit., 
vol. vi, p. 167. 

* Chios fell into the hands of a piratical Genoese family, the Zaccaria, in the reign of 
the Hast Roman Emperor Andronicus II Palaioldghos (imperabat a.d. 1282-1328). 
During the last 220 years before the Ottoman conguest the Western masters of Chios 
were a Genoese chartered company, the Maons, which had obtained possession of the 
island in a.d. 1346 after its liberation from the Zaccaria in a.d. 1329. 

J The Chiots twice secured the restoration of their traditional institutions of self- 
Rovemment after an Ottoman military occupation, because the ‘Osmanlis had the wit 
to realize that the economic prosperity of the island, which was so profitable for the 
Ottoman treasury, might evaporate if the islanders were no longer to be allowed to 
manage their own affairs in their own way. 

After the original annexation in a.d. 1566, a Chiot deputation, led by the ‘Latin' (i.e. 
Roman Catholic) bishop, and including one representative each of the Greek Church, 
the Greek merchants, the Latin merchants, and the Greek nobility, obtained from the 
Porte in A.D. 1567. through the good offices of the Qapudan Pasha Pialc, who had been 
the Porte’s instrument in annexing Chios to the Ottoman Empire in the preceding year, 
a charter rcconfcrring self-government on the islanders and exempting them from the 
dtvrishmi (the recurrent levy of children for the Padishah’s Slave-Household) and from 
other ills to which the unprivileged ra'iyeh were subject (Argcnti: Chius Vincta, pp. 
cxxxvii-clix). This charter of A.D. 1567 was followed in a.d. 1578 by another which was 
still more favourable, particularly in the matter of taxation (ibid., p. clix). More than a 
hundred years later, in a.d. 1696, after the Ottoman reconquest of Chios on the 21st 
February, 1695, from the Venetians, who had occupied the island on the 12th September, 
1694, the Sultan expressly reconfirmed the island’s constitutional privileges at the inter¬ 
cession of Alexander MavrogordAto (ibid., pp. clxxiv-v). 

Chios appears to have enjoyed greater security under Ottoman than under Genoese 
rule, and to have found it less difficult to obtain redress for its grievances from the suze¬ 
rain Power (Argcnti: Chius Vincta, p. cxxiii). 

One effect of the restoration of the island’s local autonomy under Ottoman auspices 
was to transfer political power in the island from a ‘Latin’ Roman Catholic minority 
of Genoese origin to a Greek Orthodox Christian majority—or at any rate to an aristo¬ 
cratic minority of this majority. By the terms of their capitulation to the Genoese 
conqueror Simone Vignoso on the 12th September, 1346, the Greek inhabitants of 
Chios had transferred their allegiance from the Imperial Government at Constantinople 
to the Republic of Genoa on the conditions (among others) that they should be allowed 
to retain their ancestral religion and customs, including the right to elect their own 
Metropolitan, and the existing privileges of their nobility (Argenti: Chius Vincta, p. 
xlii, n. 2); but all political power had passed into the hands of the Genoese Government 
and the chartered company (maona, Arabici ma'awnah) which had financed the con- 

! aest. After the extinction of this Genoese rtgime by the ‘Osmanlis in a.d. 1566, the 
reek Orthodox Christian Chiots were admitted to office in the government of the island 
(Argcnti: Chius Vincta, p. cxxii), and they eventually gained a preponderant voice in it. 
By a.d. 1760, Chios was being governed by an Orthodox Christian oligarchy. On the 
board of dhimoyArondcs, two places out 0! five were reserved for the Greek nobility, 
one place for the Greek plebeians, and two places for the Latins (ibid., pp. clxxx- 
clxxxi). 

The ‘Latin’ minority in Chios lost ground politically, not only in consequence of the 
Ottoman annexation in a.d. 1566, which deprived it of a political ascendancy that it had 
been enjoying for more than two hundred years by that date, but also in consequence 
of the Florentine expedition against Chios in a.d. 1599 and the Venetian occupation of 
the island in A.D. 1694-5 (see Argcnti, P. P.: Tht Expedition 0/ the Florentines to Chiot, 

[Ccnf. on next poge, 

* See Finlay, op. cit., vol. v, pp. 79-80. 



178 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
Ottoman sovereignty. An experience and ability in business, and a 
familiarity with the West which was both a cause and a consequence of 
this economic success, qualified the Chiots for serving the Porte in its 
dealings with Western neighbours with whom it no longer found itself 
able to settle its accounts by sheer force of arms; and it was no accident 
that the first two incumbents of the office of Dragoman of the Porte, 
Panayiotikis Nikoussios (fungebatur a.d. 1669—73)' and Alexander 
Mavrogordito {fungebatur a.d. 1673-99)* were both connected with 
Chios. 3 Alexander Mavrogordato's father was a Chiot silk-merchant, 
and his maternal grandfather had made a fortune as a wholesale purveyor 
of beef to the Palace and the public markets at Constantinople. 

Thereafter, Chios produced the scholar-publicist Adhamdndios 
Korais* [vivebat a.d. 1748-1833), who, in a Greek Orthodox Christian 
Westernizing movement that sprang from below upwards, is the 
symbolic figure corresponding to the autocrat-technician Peter the 
Great in a Russian Orthodox Christian Westernizing movement that 
was imposed from above downwards. 

Korais’ father was a Chiot who had settled at Smyrna, a continental 
Anatolian port, commanding a magnificent hinterland, where Western 
merchants had been the commercial pioneers and Western influences 
counted for more than they did at Constantinople at the time. In the 
new Greek community, of divers local origins, that had been called into 
existence at Smyrna by the economic opportunities created there by 
Western enterprise, Korais’ father rose to be a churchwarden, an 
alderman (Brmoyepos), and Prime Warden of the Smyrniot Guild of 
Chiot Merchants (JJpunopaylarotp rijs rGiv Xlcuv ’EpTropcov Zwrtxyias ); 
and, though he was himself a business man of no education, his wife was 

J 599 (London 1934, Lane); cundem: The Occupation oj Chios by the Venetians, 1694 
(London 1935, Lane), which brought upon the Chiot 'Latin' community an odium and a 
mistruit, in their Ottoman suzerains’ feelings towards them, from which their Greek 
Orthodox Christian fellow islanders remained exempt. After the Ottoman reoccupation 
in a.d. 1695 the ‘Latin’ Chiota were condemned to the galley* and their property was 
distributed by the Ottoman authorities among the Orthodox Chiots, who had been 
plundered by the Venetians. At the same time the Sultan ordered all Orthodox Chiots 
who had been forcibly convened to Roman Catholicism by the Venetians to return to 
Orthodoxy. The French Ambassador at Constantinople secured from the Porte a re¬ 
vocation of the sentence on the ‘Latins’ to serve in the galleys, on condition that they 
publicly renounced Roman Catholicism and embraced Orthodoxy (Argenti, The Occupa¬ 
tion of Chiot by the Venetians, pp. xcii-xciii); but from a.d. 1695 to a.d. 1720 the Latin 
community in Chios was excluded, by fiat of the Porte, from participation in the local 
administration (Argenti: Chius Vincta, p. cci). Their subsequent recovery of their 
political rights seems to have been due to a further intervention on the pan of the French 
Ambassador at Constantinople (see Finlay, on. cit., vol. v, p. 238). 

The mastic-growing villages in the south of the island were placed by the Porte under 
a special regime. They were exempt from kharilj but had to deliver 25,000 oqas of mastic 
gum to the Porte annually free of charge, and to sell the rest of the crop to the Pone at 
the price of 24 kurush for the oqa (Argenti: Chius Vincta, pp. cclxxi-ii). 

1 Sec Finlay, op. cit., vol. v, p. xi; Jorga, on. cit., vol. iv, p. 281; Zolotis, G. I.: 
'Jcnopia rfjs Xtov, vol. iii. Part I (Athens 1926, Sakellarios), pp. 441-2. 

1 Sec Finlay, op. cit., vol. v, p. 242; Jorga, op. cit., vol. iv, p. 283; Zolotis, op. cit., 
vol. in, Part I, pp. 424 - 39 ; Part II (Athens 1928, Sakellarios), pp. 730-44. 

J Panayiotikis was educated at Chios, but appears to have been of Rumeliot, not of 
Chiot, origin. 

4 This surname is presumably a Greek version of an Arabic oarrd', signifying ‘an 
accomplished reader (of the Scriptures)’. The corresponding Hebrew word qara'im 
(plural) had been adopted as a name by a sect of anti-Talmudist Jews who prided 
themselves on being ‘readers (of the Law and the Prophets as opposed to the commen¬ 
taries upon them)’ (see II. ii. 411). 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 179 
a schoolmaster’s daughter, and he had an ancestor, Anddnios Korais, 
who had been a doctor of medicine, had travelled to Paris, and had 
published literary works in Western Europe in the last quarter of the 
seventeenth century . 1 

The money made by Adhamdndios Korais’ father in business at 
Smyrna enabled Adhamdndios to emulate their Chiot ancestor’s career. 
In a.d. 1782 he went to the University of Montpellier 2 to study medicine 
there; in a.d. 1788 he went on to Paris; and, after imbibing there the 
Modern Western enthusiasm for the Ancient Greek classical literature, 
and witnessing the irruption of Democracy into Modern Western life 
through the French Revolution, he settled in Paris for good and devoted 
the forty-five years of his sojourn there (a.d. 1788-1833) to the service 
of his countrymen in the Levant both as a scholar and as a publicist. 
As a scholar he laboured to make the Ancient Greek classics accessible 
to his Modern Greek contemporaries by editing them with introductions 
and notes in a version of the Modem Greek language which he sought to 
fashion into a vehicle for conveying the Modern Western culture. 3 As 
a publicist he laboured to guide his compatriots in their endeavours to 
translate into political terms a latter-day aspiration to adopt the Modern 
Western way of life. 14 

Korais was alive to the importance of the part in the Modern Greek 
Westernizing movement that the Chiots had it in them to play, as he 
showed in a letter written by him from Paris on the 4th July, 1823, to 
Prince Alexander Mavrogorddto, a contemporary Greek statesman who, 
like Korais, was of Chiot origin, in virtue of being a descendant of the 
celebrated seventeenth-century Dragoman of the Porte. This Phanariot 
contemporary of Korais had thrown in his lot with the Greek insurgents 
against Ottoman rule who had been fighting since a.d. 1821 to carve 
a Greek national state, on a post-Revolutionary Modern Western 
pattern, out of Ottoman territory in the Morea and Rumelia; and in 
this enterprise he was given the following advice by his Parisian 
mentor: 

‘It is essential that in your arduous task you should obtain the support 
of worthy collaborators, and it will be difficult for you to find them except 
among the Chiots—not that they are intellectually superior to other 

: In seeking their education in the West, Anddnios Korais and Alexander Mavro- 
gordato (see p. 171, above) had been following an unbroken Chiot tradition dating from 
the Genoese age of Chian history. At Rome a scholarship for Chiot students had been 
founded by Allatius at the College of Saint Athanasius (a Roman Catholic College for 
Greeks). Emmanuel Timoni, the Chiot discoverer of vaccination, had studied at Padua 
shortly before a.d. 1691. In A.D. 1773 the Peter Schilirzi hospital in Chios was founded 
by a Chiot who had studied medicine in Florence and who modelled his foundation in 
his native Greek island on a hospital in his Italian alma mater. The practice of going to 
Italy for their education remained common among Chiots until the catastrophe of a.d. 
1822. This was one of the reasons why the Chiots were distinguished from other Otto¬ 
man Greeks by their greater familiarity with the West (Argcnti, Chius Vincta, p. exx), 
and why in the eighteenth century Chios was the educational centre for the Greeks 
of Constantinople, Smyrna, and Egypt (Argenti, The Massacres oj Chios, p. xxiv). 

* Montpellier was the university that served the hinterland of the port of Marseilles, 
to which it stood more or less in the relation of Padua to Venice. 

J The Modem Greek language problem has been touched upon in V. vi. 68-70. 

« For Adhamindios Korais’ antecedents and career, see Thereianos, D.: AdhamOndios 
Korais (Trieste 1889-90, Austrian Lloyd Press, 3 vols.), vol. i, pp. 89-90; Finlay, op. cit, 
vol. v, pp. 285-6. 



180 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
Greeks,' but because they have proved, by their achievements in adminis¬ 
tering their township under the yoke of slavery, how fit they arc to contri¬ 
bute to the common work for Hellas when they arc free. They have 
achieved concord and they possess what Aristotle calls “the eye that comes 
from experience”. They are the right people to inspire their brother 
Hellenes with their own concord and to share with them the fruits of 
their own experience.’* 

Besides the Chiots and other maritime Greeks under Ottoman and 
Venetian rule and the ra'iyeh under the protection of Western embassies 
at Constantinople, there were Greek and Vlach communities under 
Ottoman rule in Rumclia that served as carriers of the Modern Western 
culture into the main body of Orthodox Christendom by taking advan¬ 
tage of commercial opportunities opened up by Hapsburg military 
successes at the Ottoman Empire’s expense. Though the Hapsburg 
armies’ momentary incursion into Serbia in a.d. 1689 was followed by 
longer-lasting occupations of the Lower Morava Basin in a.d. 1718-39 
and in a.d. 1788-92, no Serb Orthodox Christian territory south of the 
Save and Danube was permanently incorporated into the Hapsburg 
Monarchy. At the same time, these ephemeral military and political 
actes de presence of the Hapsburg Power in Serbia, and, still more, its 
permanent establishment in the ex-Ottoman portion of Hungary, just 
across the river from Belgrade, had the economic effect of stimulating 
an overland trade between Central Europe and the Levant; and, though, 
in the nineteenth-century chapter of this story, the linking of Vienna 
and Budapest with Constantinople and Salonica was a work of Austrian 
enterprise, 1 the initiative in opening this overland trade-route up had 
been taken in the eighteenth century by Rumeliot Orthodox Christian 
subjects of the Porte who transported their merchandise on the backs of 
pack-animals. 4 

These eightecnth-ccntury Rumeliot trading ventures along the over¬ 
land route were family businesses in which die heads of a business at 
its Rumclian headquarters were in partnership with kinsmen stationed 
at Budapest, Vienna, and Leipzig as the family firm’s representatives at 
the trade’s Western terminals. This business organization based on 
kinship was a key to commercial success which was at the same time a 
potent conductor of Modern Western culture into Rumeliot Orthodox 
Christian homes. The Rumelian terminals and headquarters of the 
trade were apt to be fastnesses that were less handicapped than favoured 

1 Cyril Lotikaris, in his day, had been disgusted at the ignorance of Kor&si and 
other Chiots (Mcttctal, op. cit., p. 96).—A.J.T. 

1 Korais, A.: ’Arraumt^ia % Emtrro\uv (Athens 1839, Rallis). pp. 258-9. A much larger 
collection of Korais’ letters has been published by N. M. Dhamalds (Athens 1885-6, 
Perrhis, 3 vols.). 

3 The linking up of Constantinople with Austria-Hungary by a continuous perman¬ 
ent way was accomplished between the years A.D. 1872 and a.d. 1888. Salonica, and 
eventually Athens, were linked up with the Belgrade-Constantinople line by a branch 
which diverged from it at Nish. 

* At Shdtishta, in South-Western Macedonia, on the 5 th- 6 th September, 1921, the 
waiter of this Study met an old man who, as a boy, had accompanied his father on one 
of the last of the overland caravan-expeditions between Shitishta and Central Europe 
before the pack-animal trade was killed by the building of the Oriental Railway. From 
start to finish, this overland voyage on foot had kept the merchant-adventurers on the 
road for many months at a stretch (see II. ii. 262). 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS x8x 
by their physical inaccessibility in an age when, for the subjects of a 
disintegrating Ottoman Empire, the condition sine qua non, if they were 
to have any chance of economic prosperity, was the enjoyment of some 
exceptional relief from the prevalent pressure of Ottoman misgovcrn- 
ment. x The Westernization of a Rumeliot fastness is vividly portrayed in 
an account of a visit paid on the 23rd-24th December, 1801, by a British 
traveller to the industrial village of Ambeldkia, which had struck him as 
being 

•one of the most extraordinary places in all Turkey, because, being situate 
in the most secluded spot of the whole empire, and where no one would 
look for the haunts of active industry, it carries on an extensive commerce, 
the effects of which were once severely felt by our own manufacturers in 
Britain- ... 

‘The town consists of four hundred houses, as it were hanging upon 
this side of Mount Ossa, above the Pass of Tempe : 2 it contains no Turkish 
inhabitants, and enjoys a state of freedom forcibly contrasted with the 
condition of other places in the same neighbourhood, although not 
exempted from imposts. . 

'We might almost have imagined ourselves to be in Germany. I he 
inhabitants arc many of them from that country; and they are a thriving 
healthy-looking people. They wear the eastern dress, but they have intro¬ 
duced many foreign manners and customs among those of Greece. Some 
German merchants, upon our arrival, sent to us the last Frankfort Gazettes ; 
and soon afterwards they paid us a visit. As we intended to pass the night 
here, we accompanied them to see their staple manufactory for dying 
cotton thread of a red colour, which not only supports and enriches the 
inhabitants, but has given rise to a commerce so considerable that whole 
caravans are laden with this cotton for the markets of Pest, Vienna, 
Leipsic, Dresden, etc.; and hardly a day passes without some exports 
being made, which are carried even to Hamburgh. ... ... _ 

'About this time the merchants of Ampelakia began to feel the eftect 
of the preference given to English cotton thread in the German markets; 
and it was a subject of their complaint. “They foresaw," they said, "that 
the superior skill of the English manufacturers, and their being enabled 
to undersell every other competitor upon the Continent, would ultimately 
prove the ruin of their establishment.” This, no doubt, is owing to the 
improvement adopted in Great Britain of spinning cotton thread in mills, 
by means of engines that are worked by steam, which has caused such a 
considerable reduction in its price—all the thread made at Ampelakia 
being spun by manual labour. The beautiful red tincture of the 1 urkish 
cotton will, however, long maintain its pristine celebrity. It has never 
been perfectly imitated in England. The English cotton thread is much 
finer, but it has not the tenacity of that which is manufactured in Turkey; 
neither is its colour so durable. . . 

'The whole population of Ampelakia, amounting to four thousand souls, 
including even the children, is occupied in the preparation of this single 
article of commerce; the males in dyeing the wool, and the females in 
spinning the thread. . . . Although but a village, AmpelSkia contains 

1 Sec the passage quoted from Rycaut’s book in II. ii. 265, n. 2. 

* On the 2nd September. 1021, the writer of this Study managed to catch one glimpse 
of Ambcldkia from the window of a railway caninge as he was 'nv*lluw ‘J? 1 " 
through the Vale of Tempe on a section of the line between AthensandSsIomcathit 
had been built after the annexation of Southern Macedonia to the kingdom of Greece 
as a result of the Balkan Wars of a.d. 1912-13.—A.J.T. 


IS 2 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

twenty-four fabrics for dyeing only. Two thousand five hundred bales of 
cotton (each bale weighing two hundred and fifty pounds) are annually 
dyed here, the principal produce of the manufacture bcingsent to Vienna.’ 1 


The Reception of a Modern Western Culture by the Ottoman Orthodox 
Christians and its Political Consequences 

The Modern Western influence that radiated into the main body of 
Orthodox Christendom through these overland and maritime channels 
was playing upon a society which was living at the time under a universal 
state imposed by an alien Power, and in these circumstances the course 
of the Orthodox Christian Westernizing movement, evoked by this 
radiation of the Western culture in its modern form, was different from 
that of the contemporary process in a Russian Orthodox Christendom 
that was overtaken by the impact of the Modern West in a universal state 
which had been made by, and remained in, native Russian hands. In the 
main body of Orthodox Christendom, unlike Russia, the attempt to 
adopt a Modern Western way of life was made on the educational plane 
first and on the political plane afterwards, instead of vice versa. The 
academic work of an Adhamdndios KoraTs in his sanctum at Paris, and 
of a Vuk Karadzic in his sanctum at Vienna, preceded the insurrections 
of a Qara George and a MiloS Obrenovic in the Shumadiya and a 
Petrobey in the Mani against Ottoman rule, whereas, in a Russia ruled by 
a Russian autocrat, Peter the Great was not the disciple but the fore¬ 
runner of a Westernizing school of Modern Russian men of letters. 

The measure of the extent of the seventeenth-century revolution in 
the Greek attitude towards the culture of the West is given by the 
contrast between the disdain for Latin barbarism that had been felt or 
affected by Byzantine intellectuals of the school of Photius, Psellus, and 
Anna Comnena and the cult of 'Enlightened Europe’ 2 that was practised 
and preached by Korals. 

• Clarke, E. D.: Travels in Various Countries of Europe, Asia and Africa, Part II, 
Section iii (London r816, Cade)] and Davies), pp. 281 and 285-8, cited in II. ii. 26, n. 4. 
Sec also Beaujour, F.: Tableau du Commerce de la Grice (Paris 1800, Renouard, 2 vols.), 
vol. i, pp. 272-5: 

'Ambilakia par son activity rcsscmble plutflt & un bourg dc Hollande qu’i un village 
de Turkie. Ce village ripand par son indust tie le mouvement ct la vie dans tout lc pays 
d’alcntour, et il donne naissance k un commerce immense qui lie l'AUcmagnc a la Grice 
par mille fils. Sa population, qui a tripli depuis quinze ans, est aujourd'hui de quatre 
mille Smes; et toutc cettc population vit dans Ics tcinturcrics, comme un essaim 
d’abeilles vit dans une ruche. On nc connait point dans cc village les vices ni les soucis 

K ’engendre l’oisiveti. Les ctrurs des Ambilakiotes sont purs et leurs visages contcns. 

servitude qui flitriti leurs pieds les campagnes qu’arrosc le Pinic n'est point montie 
sur leurs cotcaux: aucun Turk nc peut habiter ni sejourncr parmi cux, et its se gouver- 
nent comme leurs ancetres par leurs protoyeros ct par leurs propres magistrats. Deux 
fois les farouchca Muaulmans de Larisse, jaloux de Icur aisance et dc leur bonheur, ont 
tenti d'cscaladcr leurs montagnes et dc pijler leurs maisons; et deux fois ils ont iti rc- 
poussis par des mains qui ont soudain quitte la navette pour s’armer du mousouet. 

'Tous les bras, mime ceux des enfans, sont employes dans les teinturcries d'Ambi- 
lakia; et, tandis que les hommes teignent le coton, les femmes lc filent et lc priparent... 

‘II y a i Ambilakia vingt-quatre fabriques, oCi l’on teint chaque annie deux mille cinq 
cents baltea dc coton, dc cent okes la balle. Cesdeux mille cinq centsballespasscnt toutes 
en Allemagne, et sont distribuies k Pest, Vienne, Leipsik, Dresde, Anspach ct Barcuth. 
Les marchands ambilakiotes ont des comptoirs dans toutes ccs villes, ct ils y dibitent 
le coton aux manufacturicrs allemands.' 

1 ‘Enlightened Europe'— >I>ixma^*vrj Evpdarrj —is one of Korals' key phrases. See, for 
example, his use of it in a letter of the 8th November, j8«o, to the Chiot community at 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 183 

‘Europe,’ 1 wrote Korais from Paris on the 8th November, 1810, to his 
compatriots the Chiot settlers at Smyrna, ‘used to despise us as an un¬ 
educated nation, unworthy of our splendid forefathers_But now, since 

you true sons of Hellas have thought of adorning Chios with scientific 
learning, and the people of Kydhonifes [Ayvalyq] have done the same in 
their town, and the people of Constantinople have been moved to acquire 
knowledge, the Westerners have begun to take an interest in us and to 
study our movements—our enemies in order to denounce these as the 
lifeless convulsions of corpses, our friends in order to encourage them as 
the struggles against Death of a people raised from the dead . . . 

‘What we have learnt hitherto is good, and we ought to be grateful to 
those who taught it, since they taught everything they knew. But the pre¬ 
sent state of Hellas demands something better, more systematic, more 
profound, more useful; and this, without doubt, is to be found in the 
learning of Europe, which many of our intellectual heroes have acquired 
not long since [a list of names follows], and which many priests and dea¬ 
cons as well as many laymen arc seeking to acquire to-day for the profit 
and glory of Hellas by travelling in Europe.’* 

In his unwearyingly enthusiastic advocacy of education on Modern 
Western lines, Korais—more fortunate than Voulgharis in his generation 
—was preaching to the just converted ; J and, among Greek and Serb 

Smyrna (Korais, A.: ‘Andidtopa ’fmoroAius'(Athens 1839, Rallis), p. 30), and in another 
of the 17th June, 1824, addressed to the Rumcliot Greek brigand-patriot Odhyssefs 
(ibid., p. «s). In Korais’ parlance, ‘Enlightened Europe’ means the secularized society 
of the contemporary Western World. 

* It is noteworthy that Korais uses the word ‘Europe’ in the cultural sense as a 
synonym for ‘the West’, to the exclusion of the geographically European portion of the 
domain of Orthodox Christendom. 1 Apdnthisma, pp. 35 and 39. 

J Many schools and colleges were founded on Ottoman territory* by the private enter¬ 
prise of Greek Orthodox Christian ra'fyih —both individuals and communities—be¬ 
tween the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of the Christian Era and the 
Greek uprising of a.d. 1821. Schools had been founded before the close of the eighteenth 
century at Arctsi in Bithynia and at Mcaolonghi—a Rumciian Venice inhabited by 
Greek fishermen who gained their livelihood from lagoons at the mouth of the Aspro- 
pdtamo (Achelflus) which also screened them from undue interference on the part of 
their Ottoman masters (Sathas, K.: TovpKoxparovptv/ 'EXMs (Athens 1869, Koromilas), 
PP- 459 - 6 o). In the Morca, schools were founded at Vytlna and other places between 
a.d. 1800 and A.D. 182: (Khrysanthopoulos, Ph.: ‘ AirojivqiionvpaTa (Athens 1899, 
SakelUrios, 2 vol*.), vol.«, p. 5)—perhaps partly under the inspiration of the college at 
Tripolitsa, and the schools elsewhere, that had been maintained by the Venetians during 
their occupation of the More* at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 
(sec p. 169, above). A fuller account of the new schools founded in the Morca from A.D. 
1781 onwards will be found in Sakellarios, op. cit., pp. 252-3. The most distinguished 
of the Moreot schools, in this scholar’s judgement, was the school at Dhimitsina (ibid., 
p. 147). The Morca, however, was not in the van of the contemporary Greek educational 
movement (ibid., pp. 146 and 2S3); and the foundation and support of the schools in 
the Morea was largely the work of Moreot business men living abroad (ibid., p. 147). 
Benefactions to Greek schools at Yinnina evoked from Korais in Pans a letter of the 
20th March, 1803, in which he congratulated the donor Kaplinis and, in doing so, urged 
him to ’set apart an annual sum ... for buying the most important new books published 
in [Western) Europe’, and to ‘leave no stone unturned to provide two teachers, one of 
French and one of Latin, or at least one teacher of Latin, which is almost as essential 
as Greek’ (Apdnthisma, p. 213). A college for the teaching of a Western curriculum was 
founded at Chios in a.d. 1809, under a headmaster who had been in France (David, op. 
cit., p. 77). The founding of a school at Smyrna by the Chiot community there, on the 
model of schools already established at Chios and Kydhoniis, was likewise the occasion 
of Korais’ letter of the 8th November, tSro, cited on p. 182, n. 2, above. At Kydhoni*s 
a college was founded in 1813 (Finlay, op. cit., vol. vi, p. 170), while at Athens in 18x2 
a ’Philomusc Society’ was organized for the purpose of financing the education of Greeks 
in the West (Finlay, op. cit., vol. vi, p. 98). On the 2:st November, 1S16, Korais wrote 
from Paris to the trustees of the Greek secondary school at Chios: ‘Set up a printing 
press. In France and Germany I know of humble villages which have been transformed 


184 encounters between contemporaries 

Orthodox Christian ra'iyeh alike, the newly acquired taste for a secular 
Modern Western culture excited an ambition to shake off an Ottoman 
yoke with a view to enjoying political freedom in accordance with some 
Modern Western ideal. In the political circumstances in which they 
found themselves, this was a formidable undertaking; for the Ottoman 
millet-system, under which they had been living since the reign of 
Sultan Mehmed II Fatih {imperabat a.d. 1451-81), was at the opposite 
pole of the institutional gamut from the constitution of a secular Modern 
Western state, either in its pre-Revolutionary pattern of Enlightened 
Monarchy or in its post-Revolutionary pattern of Parliamentary 
Democracy. 

The Ottoman Millet-System of Communal Autonomy 

Though the constitution of the Sultan’s Slave-Household was 'totali¬ 
tarian’ to the last degree, 1 the very efficiency that this total suppression 
of the individual qul's personal liberty had instilled, in the institution’s 
heyday, into a tiny Ottoman governing minority had made it possible 
for this handful of rulers to allow the great majority of their subjects to 
enjoy a far-reaching communal autonomy. While monopolizing the 
control of armed forces, police, criminal justice, and finance, the Porte 
was eager to save itself trouble by leaving other public business in the 
hands of autonomous communities whose heads were appointed by the 
P 5 dish§h and were personally responsible to him for the good behaviour 
of their flocks. 2 

This Ottoman communal autonomy had to be on a non-territorial 
basis—not so much for the sake of safeguarding the political security of 
an Ottoman Power which felt itself, in its prime, to be impregnable, as 
because, in consequence of a scries of social catastrophes, 3 the divers 
communities under Ottoman rule had come to be geographically inter¬ 
mingled with one another and at the same time economically differenti- 

into splendid cities as soon as they had received the divine gift of printing’ ( Apdnthitma , 
pp. 214-15). In a letter written on the 12th October, 1822, to the Chiots, to encourage 
them in their task of reconstruction after the catastrophe of A.D. 1822, he told them that 
‘the true ornaments of churches are ecclesiastics adorned with education and nobility 
of life ... and for such ornaments you must look, not to expensive edifices and marbles, 
golden manuals, and other works of men’s hands, in which God does not make his 
dwelling-place, but to secondary schools, libraries, printing, and all the other instru¬ 
ments of enlightenment and education’ (AptSnlhuma, p. 46). After the establishment of 
the nucleus ot an independent Greek national state, we find Korals, true to his principles, 
writing from Paris on the 5th January-, 1828, to President Capodistrias about books for 
the nation, partly the gift of the brothers Zosimrfdhes, which had been purchased in 
Western Europe and dispatched to NAvplia by Korals (Aftanthisma, pp, 265-8. See 
further pp. 269-70 for a letter of the 1st March, 1829, to the same correspondent on the 
same subject). « See the sketch of it in III. iii. 22-50. 

1 This responsibility was brought home to the millet-bishy 1 of the Millct-i-ROm by 
Sultan Murad IV when he put the Oecumenical Patriarch Cyril Loukaris to death on 
the 26th June, 1638, for having failed to prevent the Don Cossacks from seizing Azov 
(see pp. 156. above), and again by Sultan Mahmud II when he put to death the Oecumen¬ 
ical Patriarch Gregory on Easter Day the 22nd April, 1821, for having failed to prevent 
the Moreots from rebelling against the Porte. From the Ottoman constitutional stand¬ 
point the execution of Gregory was a warrantable exercise of severity, since the Moreots, 
unlike the Don Cossacks, were Ottoman subjects for whom the Oecumenical Patriarch 
was responsible politically as well as ecclesiastically. 

3 Chief among them being the disintegration of the main body of Orthodox Christen¬ 
dom and the recurrent irruptions of Eurasian Nomads into both South-Eastern Europe 
and Asia Minor. 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS i8 S 
ated, till it had become hard to say whether they were nationalities, 
occupational groups, or social classes. Though the Jews and the Roman 
Catholics of the Latin Rite were perhaps the only communities of 
Ottoman subjects that were entirely divorced from the cultivation of the 
soil, the other communities likewise tended to become adepts in some 
particular profession or craft 1 —which any of their adherents might 
practise anywhere within the Ottoman frontiers—besides constituting 
one element in the local peasantry of some particular region. The Greeks, 
Vlachs, and Armenians, for example, like the Jews and the Latins, were 
ubiquitous as men of business; the Greeks were also ubiquitous as 
sailors and the Albanians as masons and latterly also as mercenary 
soldiers, while the Vlachs had a wide range as shepherds, and the 
Bulgars as military grooms and market gardeners. 2 The Ottoman system 
of communal autonomy was admirably framed to meet this ‘geosocial’ 
situation; 3 for the division of powers between the autonomous com¬ 
munities and the Imperial Government was not territorial but functional. 
On the one hand the communities did not share with the Porte any of 
the four above-mentioned prerogatives of sovereignty, even in districts 
in which their adherents happened to constitute a majority of the local 
population; on the other hand the measure of self-government delegated 
to them by the Porte was exercised by their communal authorities 
throughout the Empire—with whose dominions the domain of each 
autonomous community was thus in fact conterminous. 

This network of autonomies—all conterminous with Ottoman 
sovereignty and with one another—embraced all the Empire’s inhabi¬ 
tants; for, though the term ‘millet’ technically applied to non-Muslim 
ra'iyeh only, a similar autonomy was enjoyed by the community of free 
Muslim Ottoman subjects and also by the communities of resident aliens 
together with their Ottoman protegds. The responsible headship of an 
autonomous community was conferred—or imposed—by the Porte ex 
officio on some appropriate ecclesiastical dignitary, if such was to be 
found. The head of the free Ottoman Muslim community, for example, 
was the Shcykh-cl-Islam ('Grand Mufti’) of Constantinople; the head 
of the Ottoman Orthodox Christian community (Greek, Bulgar, Serb, 
Ruman, Albanian, Georgian, QSramanly, and Arab, without distinction) 
was the Oecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople; the head of the 
Ottoman Gregorian (Armenian Monophysite) Christian community was 
the Gregorian Patriarch of Constantinople; and so on. These Muslim, 
Christian, and Jewish prelates (for the Jews, too, were organized in an 
ecclesiastical corporation) were compelled by the Porte to accept politi¬ 
cal responsibility for co-religionists who were Ottoman subjects, even 
when these were not members of their own ecclesiastical flock. The 
Oecumenical Patriarch, for instance, as millet-b 5 shy of the Millct-i- 

i Professional specialization is apt to be a retort to social penalization (see II. ii. 
208-12). # _ 4 .See II. ii. 223. 

> The situation was, of course, one of the familiar features of universal states, and 
the Ottoman millet-system was built on foundations that had been laid successively by 
the Achaemenian and Sasanian Empires and the Arab Caliphate in their efforts to cope 
with previous presentations of the same political problem. The wealth of the historical 
experience which the Ottoman millet-system thus incorporated was, no doubt, one of 
the secrets of its long-continuing success. 



186 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
RQm, was responsible politically to the Porte for Ottoman subjects who 
were the spiritual subjects of the Oecumenical Patriarch’s ecclesiastical 
peers the Patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, the Arch¬ 
bishop of Ochrida, and the President of the Autocephalous Church of 
Cyprus, as well as for Ottoman subjects who were the spiritual subjects 
of the Oecumenical Patriarchate itself; and, when the Gregorian Bishop 
of Brusa was raised to the rank of Patriarch by Sultan Mehmed II Fatih 
in a.d. 1461, he had to pay for this ecclesiastical aggrandisement by sub¬ 
mitting to be saddled with political responsibility for Christian ra'iyeh 
who were not only outside his ecclesiastical jurisdiction but were not 
even of the same communion. 1 The role played by these ecclesiastical 
millet-b 5 shys of autonomous communities of Ottoman subjects was 
played by the ambassadors of foreign Powers in the government of their 
own nationals and proteges resident in the Ottoman Empire, and by the 
Padishah himself in the government of a Slave-Household that was his 
corporate instrument for exercising his sovereign powers. 2 

It will be seen that the Ottoman Millet-i-Rum, just because its con¬ 
stitution was so well adapted to the social circumstances of the main 
body of Orthodox Christendom in the Ottoman Age, was utterly unlike 
any secular Modern Western political institution; and, as soon as the 
Westernization of the 'Osmanlis’ Orthodox Christian ra'iyeh reached 
a point at which it awakened political ambitions in their hearts, they 
were faced with the question how they were to pass from this utterly 
un-Western regime to some form of Modern Western political life. 

« See Steen de Jehay, F. van den: De la Situation Ugale des Sujets Ottomans Non- 
Mussulmans (Brussels 1906, Schepens). p. 62. In a.d. 1461 the newly created Gregorian 
Patriarch was, in fact, made millet-bash 9 of all non-Orthodox Christian ra’iyeh in the 
Ottoman Empire. Thereafter, in course of time, his political responsibility gradually 
came to be restricted to Gregorian Christian Ottoman subjects by the Porte’s progressive 
recognition de facto, though not in every case de jure, of the communal autonomy of the 

{ aconite Monophysites, the Ncstorians, the Roman Catholics of divers ritca (Latins and 
Jniate ex-Monotheletc Maronites, cx-Ncstorian Chaldeans, ex-Jacobites, and ex- 
Grcgorians), and eventually also the Protestants. The patriarchal vicars of the Latin rite, 
who administered the Latin Roman Catholic Ottoman community from a.d. 1599 on¬ 
wards (Steen de Jehay, op. cit., p. 308), were exceptional among the Ottoman millet- 
bJLshJs in being non-Ottoman subjects appointed by an ecclesiastical authority, the Pope, 
who was not an Ottoman subject either and whose sec lay outside the Ottoman Empire’s 
frontiers. The Gregorian, like the Roman Catholic, subjects of the Porte were spiritual 
subjects of an ecclesiastical authority who was not an Ottoman subject—in this case the 
Gregorian Catholicos of Echmiazin, whose see was under Safawi Shi'i Muslim sove¬ 
reignty from a.d. 150X—2 onwards (see I. i. 371) and was ceded by Persia to Russia in 
a.d. 1S28. The Catholicos, however, was impotent to give to the Gregorian Patriarch of 
Constantinople the support and protection which the Constantinopolitan Patriarchal 
Vicar of the Latin rite could be sure of receiving from the Vatican. 

1 Though the ei-devant Christians from whom the Padishah’s Slave-Household was 
recruited invariably became converts to Islam before being commissioned (see III. iii. 
37, n. 1), the act of religious conversion did not depress these individually disciplined 
and dedicated, and therefore politically all-powerful, Ottoman Muslim public slaves to 
a political parity with their politically powerless free Muslim co-religionists. The 
Padishah’s Household in its heyday was virtually an autonomous community in itself, 
and Sultan Bayczid II ( imperabat a.d. 1481-1512) gave them the privilege of being 
exempted from the jurisdiction of the shari' courts and being judged exclusively by their 
own officers (Lybyer, A. H.: The Government of the Ottoman Empire in the Time of 
Suleiman the Magnificent (Cambridge, Mass. 1913, Harvard University Press), p. 116). 
The Seyyids (i.e. recognized claimants to descent from the Prophet Muhammad) like¬ 
wise virtually constituted a separate autonomous community of their own under the 
headship of the Nakib el-Eshrif (Lybyer, op. cit., pp. 206-7; Rycaut, Sir Paul: The 
Present Stale of the Ottoman Empire (London 1668, Starkey and Brome), pp. no-u). 
See further, X. ix. 37. 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 187 
The Fiasco of the Phanariots' ‘Great Idea' 

In the course of the century ending in a.d. 1821 the Phanariot Greek 
entourage of the Oecumenical Patriarchate came to transmute their old 
dream of resuscitating the East Roman ghost of the Roman Empire* 
into a new dream of solving ‘the Western Question’ on the political plane 
by converting the Ottoman Empire, as Peter the Great had converted the 
Russian Empire, into a replica of such contemporary Western multi¬ 
national ‘enlightened monarchies’ as the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy 
and the Kingdom of Sardinia; and this ambitious Phanariot Greek 
political aspiration was fostered by an encouraging series of progressive 
political successes. 

In making the Oecumenical Patriarch ex officio millet-bashy of all the 
Orthodox Christian ra'iyeh of an expanding Ottoman Empire, Sultan 
Mchmed II Fatih and Sultan Selim I Yawuz had given this Constantino- 
politan prelate political authority over Orthodox Christian peoples that 
had never been under the rule of any Constantinopolitan emperor since 
the Arab conquest of Syria and Egypt in the seventh century of the 
Christian Era; 1 and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the 
political power of the Phanar had been farther extended by the action 
of their free Muslim fellow subjects. During the hundred years following 
the death, in a.d. 1566, of Suleyman the Magnificent the free Muslims 
had compelled the Padishah’s Slave-Household to take them into partner¬ 
ship in the government of the Ottoman Empire, and they had followed 
up this political victory over the ci-devant Christian qullar by taking the 
Greek ra'iyeh, in their turn, into partnership with themselves. 

The creation of the offices of Dragoman of the Porte and Dragoman 
of the Fleet, in order to employ Ottoman Greek ability in the Ottoman 
service for redressing an adverse balance in the struggle between the 
Ottoman Empire and the Western Powers, had been followed in the 
eighteenth century' by measures in favour of the Greeks at the expense of 
non-Greek Orthodox Christian ra'iyeh who had openly taken sides with 
the ‘Osmanlis’ Hapsburg and Russian adversaries. During the no 
years between the Ruman Prince Demetrius Cantcmir’s desertion to the 
Russian camp in a.d. 1711 and the Greek Prince Hypsilandi’s crossing 
of the Pruth in a.d. 1821, the Porte consistently appointed Phanariot 
Greek instead of Ruman princes to the thronelets of Wallachia and 
Moldavia. 3 In a.d. 1737, after the Serb Patriarch Arscnije IV had 
followed the precedent, set in a.d. 1690 by his predecessor Arscnije III, 4 
of inciting his flock to take up arms against the Porte in the Hapsburg 
cause and subsequently seeking asylum in Hapsburg territory, the Porte 
appointed a Greek to the vacant patriarchal throne of Ped; 5 and in a.d. 
1766 the Porte suppressed both the Serb Patriarchate of Ped and the 
West Bulgarian Archbishopric of Ochrida 6 and placed the non-Greek 
flocks of both these hitherto ecclesiastically autonomous Orthodox 
Christian churches under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of a Greek 

I See VI. vii. 29-31. * On this point, see IV. iv. 622. 

J See II. ii. 225, n. x. * See pp. 166-8, above. 

s See IJadrovics, L.: L’Egtise Serbe tout la Domination 7 W?w (Pans 1947, Presse 
Universitaires de France), p. 153. 1 See IV. iv. 622, n. 6. 



188 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
Oecumenical Patriarch who, as millet-bashy of the Millet-i-Rum, was 
already politically responsible for them. The dependence on the 
Phanariots into which the Porte had fallen by the close of the eighteenth 
century for the conduct of ever more important diplomatic dealings with 
ever more potent Western Powers is illustrated by the fact that, when in 
a.d. 1793 the Porte established permanent diplomatic missions in Paris, 
Vienna, London, and Berlin, it could find no Muslim 'Osmanlis com¬ 
petent to serve as ambassadors, and was compelled to appoint Greek 
Christian charges d’affaires. 1 

Between a . d . 1766 and a . d . 1821 the Phanariot Greeks might have 
fancied that they had within their reach an ascendancy in the Ottoman 
Empire of the kind that the contemporary King-Emperor Joseph II had 
been working to secure for the Germans in the Danubian Hapsburg Mon¬ 
archy. By this time, however, the Phanariots’ apparently promising 
political position had actually been undermined by repercussions of 
revolutionary Western political events. In the first place, Enlightened 
Monarchy—the one Modern Western political institution to which it 
was practically possible for the Phanariots to accommodate themselves 
—had been abruptly supplanted by Nationalism as the dominant politi¬ 
cal ideal in the West itself, 2 and in the second place the non-Greek 
Orthodox Christian ra'iyeh of the Ottoman Empire foresaw no satisfac¬ 
tion for their own awakening national aspirations in the exchange of a 
Turkish Muslim for a Phanariot Greek ascendancy—as the Rumanian 
population of the Danubian Principalities showed when, after no years’ 
local experience of Phanariot Greek rule, they made a fiasco of Hypsi- 
landi’s raid by turning a deaf ear to the Greek invader’s summons to 
them to rally to him as fellow members of an Ottoman Orthodox 

* See d’Ohsson, I. M.: Tableau GtnJral de rEmpire Ottoman (Paris 1788-1824, 7 
vols.), voL vii (Didot), p. 573. 

1 The victory of the ideal of Nationalism over the ideal of Enlightened Monarchy in 
Ottoman Orthodox Christian soul* is reflected in the writings of Korais, who was as 
ardently nationalist a* he was anti-Phanariot and anti-Byzantine. 

In a letter addressed to a Greek National Delegation in London, he cite* the authority 
of Franklin, Washington, Jefferson, and Bcntham, and quotes one of Franklin’s sayings 
( Apanthisma , pp. 20-25). In a letter of the 4th July, 1S23, addressed to Alexander 
Mavrogordito, on the new constitution of the infant Greek national state, he writes: 
'Persuade our countrymen to adopt the institutions of the Anglo-Americans [i.e. the 
people of the United States] (ibid., p. 255), and in the same letter he conveys his hostility 
to the Phanariots, though this without discourtesy to his correspondent, through a 
topical application of the text 'Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?' (ibid., p. 
*S4>- 

Korais' political convictions worked together with his linguistic and literary ideal* to 
make him execrate the East Roman Empire. 

'The yoke of the Romans, the Graeco-Roman Emperors and the Turks weighed each 
more heavily than the last upon the Hellenes', he wrote in a letter of the 10th January, 
1822, addressed to the leaders of the Greek national uprising ( Apdnlhisma , p. 4), and in 
his letter of the 12th October, 1822, to the Chiots he declared that, 'if the Graeco-Roman 
Emperors had given to the education of the race a small part of the attention that they 
gave to multiplying churches and monasteries, they would not have betrayed the race to 
other rulers far worse deluded than they were. For all the evils that we have suffered 
from the maniac Muslims we are indebted to those material-minded and fleshly Christ¬ 
ian Emperors. Now that our turn has come, let us show ourselves wiser and truer 
Christians than they did, and leam by the misfortunes which they suffered in their 
generation and bequeathed to us.' ( Apanthisma , pp. 46-47)- 

‘That macarone Phrantzfs! Reading three or four pages of him was enough to make 
my gout worse! C'est une honour! And then we arc surprised that the Graeco-Roman 
Empire fell!' ( Apdnthisma , p. 133). 




THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 189 

Christian community that was to liberate itself from the Ottoman yoke 
by taking up arms under Phanariot Greek leadership. 1 

The Disruption of an Ottoman Orthodox Christendom by a Modern 
Western Nationalism 

This frustration of the Phanariots’ 'Great Idea’ was an intimation 
that a multi-national Orthodox Christian Millet-i-Rum which had set 
its heart on adopting a Modern Western way of life on the political as 
well as on the educational plane would now have to sort itself out into 
a patchwork of parochial Greek, Ruman, Serb, Bulgar, Albanian, and 
Georgian national states—on the pattern of France, Spain, Portugal, 
Holland, and Great Britain—in each of which a particular language, 
instead of a particular religion, would be the shibboleth uniting 'fellow 
countrymen’ and distinguishing them from ‘foreigners’, even though 
these ‘foreigners’ might be Christians of the same Orthodox Faith who, 
under the Ottoman dispensation, had been fellow members, ex officio 
religionis, of the same empire-wide Millet-i-Rum. 

At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the makings of 
this exotic Modern Western pattern in the linguistic and political map 
of the Ottoman Empire were exiguous. Within the Ottoman frontiers at 
that date there were few districts whose population was even approxi¬ 
mately homogeneous in linguistic nationality, and few which possessed 
even the rudiments of local statehood. Ottoman Orthodox Christian 
autonomous territories could almost be counted on the fingers of one 
hand: the tw r o Rumanian principalities Wallachia and Moldavia 1 and 
the four Georgian principalities Guriel, Mingrelia, Imeretia, and 
Abklmia would exhaust the list. The only other materials for building 
Orthodox Christian national states out of the ruins of a disintegrating 
Ottoman Empire were single communities—like the Greek and Moreot 
Albanian islands and portlets noticed above 3 —which enjoyed some 
measure of autonomy by charter, custom, or inadvertence, and barbarian 
fastnesses—like the Mani, the Agrapha, 4 the Shumadiya, and Montene¬ 
gro—which had either never effectively been brought under Ottoman 
rule or had effectively succeeded in casting it off. 5 The enduring political 
effects of ephemeral eighteenth-century occupations of the Lower 
Morava Basin by the Hapsburgs and of the Morea by the Venetians 
declared themselves in the nineteenth century when these areas became 
the nuclei of a Serb and a Greek national state. 6 

Bulgarian and Albanian national states 7 were slower in making their 

* This Rumanian reaction to Hypsilandi’s adventure, and it* decisive effect on the 
Greek adventurer’s fortunes, have been noticed in II. ii. 227._ 

1 The adjoining principality of Transylvania had likewise been under Ottoman 
suzerainty in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the Ottoman Power had 
been at its apogee; but the Rumanian Orthodox Christian and Uniate element in the 
population of Transylvania was not one of the politically enfranchised Transylvanian 
‘nations’, though in numbers it may already have been equal to the Magyars, Szekels, 
and Saxons put together. 

3 On pp. t 7 . 4 - 5 . 4 Sce P- * 75 > n. 3, above. 

s The nuclei of the Greek successor-state of the Ottoman Empire have been enumer¬ 
ated, by anticipation, in II. ii. 261-2. 8 Sec V. v. 637-8. 

’ In Albania, by the time when she recovered her independence, the Orthodox 
Christian element in the population had dwindled to a minority confined to the South. 



190 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
appearance, and, when they did appear, they owed their foundation 
to the action of foreign Powers. The Bulgarian successor-state of the 
Ottoman Empire was brought to birth in a.d. 1877 by Russia and the 
Albanian in a.d. 1913 by the Hapsburg Monarchy and Italy. Moreover, 
all these ex-Ottoman Orthodox Christian national states came into 
existence piecemeal, and the labour of winning a fragmentary autonomy 
or independence had to be followed up by the further labour of bringing 
the fragments together. 1 Moldavia had to be united with Wallachia, 
Montenegro with Serbia, Eastern Rumelia with Bulgaria, an autonomous 
Samos and an autonomous Crete with a nuclear Kingdom of Greece; 
and the process of redistributing Ottoman territory into national 
domains had to be completed by a dismemberment of Macedonia—the 
most recalcitrant of all Ottoman territories to this painfully protracted 
process of partition, just because Macedonia had been the quintessence 
of the Ottoman Empire on the Rumelian side of the Straits. 

This radical reconstruction of the political map of Ottoman Orthodox 
Christendom, in order to make it conform to a revolutionary Modem 
Western pattern, spelled misery for millions of human beings over a 
period of four or five generations beginning at the outbreak of the Great 
Russo-Turkish War of a.d. 1768-74 and ending only in the breathing- 
space between the First and the Second World War; and the suffering 
inflicted became more widespread and concurrently more intense as the 
Procrustean operation was successively performed upon territories and 
populations that were less and less amenable to being reorganized politically 
on a basis of nationality in the Modern Western understanding of the 
idea. 1 Even the Morea, as it was in a . d . 1821 , could not be made as 
Greek as a contemporary France was French without exterminating a 
previously dominant Ottoman Muslim minority, amounting to about 
10 per cent, of the total population of the eyalet, 3 by a barbarous com¬ 
bination of eviction and massacre. 

nXalvt fiavovXats yia iraiSid, yvvaixcs yid rods avrpfs, 
xXaUi xai fua xavov/ucaa yid to fiovayoyid njs.* 

This exultantly savage Orthodox Christian Greek Moreot paean on ; 

the destruction of the tyrannical Muslim Albanian Moreot township of 
Ldla in June 1821 s is characteristic of the inhuman spirit that inspired the 
partition of the Ottoman Empire during the next hundred years. In a 
world in which the existing communities were geographically inter¬ 
mingled and economically interdependent, an indigenous millet system 
of communal organization, which had faithfully reflected this Ottoman 

The Centre had become predominantly Muslim (see pp. 164-5, above), while the North 
had remained predominantly Roman Catholic. 

1 The apprenticeship which many of these fragments had to serve under Ottoman 
suzerainty, as the price of being stamped with the seal of legitimacy by the Porte, has 
been noticed in VI. vii. 16-17. 

J SseH'H- 227 - 8 - . . . s See pp. 681-3, below. 1 

* 0 1 AaAuunoots, in Polltis, N. G.: ExXcryal djro ra Tpayov&ia row 'EXAtjviKoG AaoD 
(Athens 1914, Estia), p. 18: ‘Mothers weep for children, wives for their husbands, and 
n lady [khanum] weeps for her only son.’ 

* On the 3 tst May, 1912, the ruins of Ldla were still lying desolate when the writer 
of this Study walked past them that morning cn route from Olympia to Dhivri. 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 191 
society’s structure, could not be rejected in favour of an exotic ideology 
of Nationalism, which reflected the quite alien structure of a Late 
Modem Western Society, without precipitating an Ishmaelitish struggle 
for existence. 1 In preaching to the hitherto widely dispersed speakers of 
each of the interwoven languages of the Ottoman Empire that they had 
a hitherto unheard-of sacred right to possess a sovereign independent 
linguistically homogeneous national state of their own on the pattern of a 
France or a Spain, the Ottoman Orthodox Christian apostles of a novel 
Western political creed were, in effect, inciting their brethren to make a 
virtue of evicting or massacring their neighbours for the crime of having 
inherited a different mother tongue; and, in the name of an alien ideal 
which had thus been imported in an evil hour, the shot-silk fabric of a 
seamless Ottoman robe was remorselessly plucked to pieces by cruel 
hands, and the broken threads of each diverse national hue were then 
roughly rewoven into so many separate rags to make a patchwork coat 
of many colours in which the only note of uniformity was a monoton¬ 
ously pervasive stain of blood. 2 A crescendo of atrocities and tragedies 
came to its climax in the wholesale deportation of an Armenian minority 
in the eastern vilayets in a.d. 1915 by order of a ‘New ‘Osmanli 1 govern¬ 
ment of the day, and the wholesale flight of a Greek Orthodox Christian 

1 Gen. xvi. 12. 

a Thi* morally devastating effect of the impact of a Modem Western Nationalism 
upon an Ottoman Orthodox Christendom during this dark century of cx-Ottomon 
Orthodox Christian history was aggravated by the vein of Archaism with which the 
intrusive Western ideology had been charged, before export, by a Western Romantic 
Movement. A partition of Macedonia between Bulgarian, Turkish, Greek, Albanian, 
and Serbian national successor-states of the Ottoman Empire would have been difficult 
enough to achieve without fearful injustices and atrocities, even if each of the interested 
nationalities had scrupulously limited its claims to territories in which a majority of the 
living generation of the inhabitants genuinely wished to be included in the claimant 
nationality’s inchoate national state. The conflict between rival national claims, and the 
malice, hatred, and all uncharitableness envenoming the feelings of the cx-Ottoman 
Orthodox Christian peoples towards one another, were, however, further accentuated 
by an Archaism which, instead of being content to take the living msp as the basis for 
its territorial claims, insisted upon basing these on some perhaps quite ephemeral past 
state of the map in which the political domination, as distinct from the national domain, 
of this or that people had been at its maximum extent. The Serbs, for example, would 
claim the frontiers of the fourteenth-century empire of Stephen Dushan; the Bulgars 
would claim the frontiers of the tenth-century empires of Samuel and Symeon; the 
Greeks would claim the frontiers of the eleventh-century empire of Basil the Bulgar- 
slayer (BovAyapoterovos)—and this not as a multi-national empire in which the Greeks 
were merely to exercise an ascendancy, but as a Greek national state that was to be ns 
Greek as France was French. 

The Ottoman Turks themselves, when the Turkish diaspora in Macedonia caught the 
infection of an archaistic Western Nationalism from their insurgent Orthodox Christian 
ra'iyeh, toyed with the conceit of seeking an ultra-archaistic compensation for n Rumili 
which could never be saved for a Turkish national state, though it had been the heart 
of an Ottoman Empire. Academic-minded Turkish archaist-nationalists cast back to a 
pre-Islamic and pre-sedentary chapter in the history of a Eurasian Nomad minority 
of their forebears (sec p. 262, n. 1, below). They consoled themselves for the loss of 
Rumili by conjuring up the vision of Qyzyl Elma: a legendary Garden of Eden, in which 
a primaeval Turkish people had eaten of the magic fruit of the Red Apple tree long 
before Ertoghrul’s fugitive war-hand had been blown out of the Steppe by a Mongol 
explosion. Were not at least two-thirds of the Turkish-speaking portion of Mankind still 
to be found in Eurasia outside an Ottoman Turkey's frontiers? One of the most signal 
evidences of Ghazi MustafS Kemil AtatQrk’s political genius was his clear recognition 
that a visionary pursuit of this mirage of a Ycni TdrSn beyond the eastern limits of an 
Ottoman Turkish national home in Anatolia w’as bound to bring Turkey into a disastrous 
headlong collision with a Russia who had not indicated any relaxation of her hold upon 
the Crimea, the Volga Basin, the Caucasus, and Central Asia in styling herself ’the Union 
of Soviet Socialist Republics’ instead of 'the Russian Empire’. 


192 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
minority from Western Anatolia in a.d. 1922 after the debacle of in¬ 
vading Greek armies that had avenged Mehmed Fatih’s conquest of 
Constantinople by overrunning the cradle of the Ottoman Power. It 
was only after these supreme catastrophes that the sufferings of ‘dis¬ 
placed persons’ were mitigated by the beneficent intervention of the 
League of Nations, and the national feud between Greeks and Turks was 
brought to an end by the statesmanship of Elcftherios Veniz&os and 
Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. 1 

Orthodox Christian national states that had come into existence in 
these untoward circumstances and on this petty scale could not, of 
course, indulge, like a Westernizing Russian Empire, in the ambition of 
playing, vis-b-vis the Modern West, the role of the East Roman Empire 
vis-b-vis a Medieval Western Christendom. Their feeble energies were 
absorbed in local disputes over small parcels of territory, and, though 
the territorial aspirations of the Serb and Rumanian national successor- 
states of the Ottoman Empire were partly responsible for the break-up 
of one great Modem Western state, the Danubian Hapsburg Mon¬ 
archy, 1 the bitterest animosities of these politically reanimated Orthodox 
Christian peoples were those which they harboured against one another. 
Even if the emergence of this cluster of Orthodox Christian national 
states in South-Eastern Europe had been forestalled by a successful 
realization of the Phanariots’ 'Great Idea’, a reconstituted East Roman 
Empire could never have challenged the West on its own account, sup¬ 
posing that its makers had conceived the ambition; for it could never 
even have come into existence, or kept itself in existence after being set 
up, unless it had been established by Russian force of arms and been 
maintained as Russia’s satellite. This did not come to pass, though the 
Empress Catherine II of Russia played with the idea 3 after her great 
victory over the Ottoman Empire in the Russo-Turkish War of a.d. 
1768-74. In the event the petty national states into which the Ottoman 
Millet-i-Rum eventually sorted itself out in the course of the nineteenth 
and twentieth centuries found themselves in an international situation 
not unlike that of their predecessors during the centuries immediately 
preceding the establishment of a Pax Ottomanica in the main body of 
Orthodox Christendom. In that age the Greeks, Serbs, Bulgars, and 
Rumans had been confronted with a choice between domination by their 
Medieval Western fellow Christians and domination by the ‘Osmanlis. 
In a post-Ottoman Age the alternatives that confronted them were 
incorporation into a secular Modern Western body social and subjection, 
first to a Petrine, and thereafter to a Communist, Russia. 

Russia's Competition with the West for the Ex-Ottoman Orthodox 
Christians' Allegiance 

In a.d. 1952 a majority of these non-Russian Orthodox Christian 
peoples were actually under Russia's military and political control. 
Georgia was one of the constituent republics of the Soviet Union; 
Rumania, Bulgaria, and Albania were satellites of the Soviet Union. The 


1 See VI. vii 30-31. 


1 See II. ii. 177-88. 


J See II. ii. 225, n 2. 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 193 
only two non-Russian Orthodox Christian countries which at this date 
were not in Russia’s clutches were Greece—where the Russians had 
eventually been worsted in an undeclared war-after-thc-war between 
the Soviet Union and the United States in which the combatants on the 
two sides had been Greek proxies of the foreign belligerents—and 
Jugoslavia, which had thrown off a post-war Russian hegemony without 
having been overtly molested up to date; and even Jugoslavia, whose 
rulers had not repudiated Communism in repudiating their allegiance to 
Moscow, had found herself, like Greece, unable to keep Russia at bay 
out of her own resources, without drawing upon American aid. At the 
same time it was significant that, save for the single case of Georgia, 1 
this Russian domination over non-Russian Orthodox Christian countries 
had been established only since the end of the General War of a.d. 
I 939 — 451 ! ^ at even an indirect exercise of Russian power was every¬ 
where odious to all but a small minority of Communists who were 
governing these countries with Russian backing as the Soviet Govern¬ 
ment’s agents; that the Jugoslav Communists had already rebelled 
against the hegemony of their Russian comrades; and that this recalci¬ 
trance against a Russian ascendancy was an old story which could be 
illustrated from the history of Russia’s relations with Rumania, Bulgaria, 
and Serbia in the nineteenth century, at dates long previous to the 
metamorphosis of the Russian Empire into the Soviet Union. 

On the morrow of the Russo-Turkish War of a.d. 1877-8, for example, 
Russia had looked forward, with a not unreasonable confidence, to 
exercising a paramount political influence over a Serbia whom she had 
just rescued from a single-handed struggle with Turkey, over a Rumania 
to whom she had just presented the Dobruja, and, above all, over a 
Bulgaria whom she had just brought into existence ex nihilo through 
the sheer force of Russian arms. Yet, in the sequel, Bulgaria shook off 
Russia’s tutelage at the first opportunity, Serbia veered back for a genera¬ 
tion (a.d. 1881-1903) into the political orbit of the Hapsburg Monarchy, 
and Rumania—forgetting the acquisition of the Dobruja and only re¬ 
membering that, in exchange for this piece of Ottoman territory, Russia 
had forced her to retrocede the fraction of Bessarabia that had been 

1 The United Kingdom of Kartli-Kakheti, which was the largest and most important 
of the Georgian states, placed itself under Russian suzerainty in a.d. 1783; was annexed 
by Russia at the turn of the years a.d. 1800 and A.D. 1801 (the exact date is variously 
given as cither the 18th December, 1800, or the 18th January, 1801); and was finally 
subdued, after a last rebellion, in a.d. 1812. The Principality of Mingrelia was annexed 
by Russia in A.D. 1803 and the Principality of Imerctia in A.D. >804-10. Persia renounced 
in Russia’s favour all claims over Kartli-Kakheti, Mingrelia, Imerctia, and Abkhazia in 
the Russo-Persian peace treaty concluded at Gulistan in a.d. 1813. Turkey recognized 
Russian sovereignty over Kartli-Kakheti, Mingrelia, and Imerctia, and also over Guriel, 
in the Russo-Turkish peace treaty concluded at Adrianople on the 14th September, 
1829, Art. 4. In the same article Turkey ceded to Russia the town of Akhaltzik and the 
fort of Akhalkalak. Details will be found in W. E. D. Allen: 'The Caucasus’, in The 
Bailie and Caucasian Stales (London 1923, Hoddcr and Stoughton), pp. 195-9, and in 
the same author’s A History of the Georgian People (London 1932, Kegan Paul), pp. 
210-18. 

The Russian annexation of Georgia at the beginning of the nineteenth century, like 
the French conquest of Corsica in a.d. 1768, had the unforeseen effect of providing a 
political genius born in the annexed territory with a field for his abilities and ambitions 
which would have been closed to him if his obscure and secluded homeland had not 
been swallowed up by an acquisitwe Great Power. No more would have been heard of 
Stalin as a Georgian priest than of Napoleon as a Corsican patriot. 

B 28 M.vm H 



194 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
presented to Rumania by the victors in the Crimean war*—came to look 
upon Russia, instead of Turkey, as her national bugbear. 2 

This anti-Russian feeling in non-Russian Orthodox Christian 
countries might seem at first sight surprising at a time when Orthodox 
Christianity was still the established religion of a Russian state that 
claimed to be the heir of the East Roman Empire. In the ninth-century 
Macedonian Slav dialect known as ‘Old Slavonic’ the Russian, Ruman¬ 
ian, 3 Bulgarian, and Serbian Orthodox churches had a common liturgi¬ 
cal language, while the Russian, Bulgar, and Serb peoples were also 
more intimately linked by the kinship between their living Slav vernacu¬ 
lars. Why did ‘Pan-Slavism’ and 'Pan-Orthodoxy' prove of so little 
avail to Russia in her dealings with the Slavonic-speaking and other 

1 Bessarabia—the slice of territory between the Rivers Dniestr and Pruth—had been 
divided under the Ottoman regime into two parts: the Rujiq, on the Black Sea Coast, 
which was under Nomad occupation and Ottoman administration, and an inland part 
which was cultivated by a Rumanian and Ukrainian peasantry and was an integral por¬ 
tion of the autonomous principality of Moldavia. In a.d. 1812, Russia had compelled 
the Porte to cede both parts of Bessarabia to her as the price of peace at the end of the 
Russo-Turkish War of 1807-12 (Russo-Turkish peace treaty concluded at Bucarest on 
the 28th May, :81a, Art. A 

1 This substitution of Russia for Turkey as the principal foreign object of the 
Rumanian people’s dislike and apprehension was a natural consequence of this particular 
Orthodox Christian nation’s situation and history. Situated, as they were, in the fairway 
of Russia’s overland avenue for the invasion of Rumelia, the Rumans had been the first 
Ottoman Orthodox Christian people to have a first-hand experience of a Russian 
‘liberating’ army; and they had also been the only Ottoman Orthodox Christian people 
that had escaped the experience of bcinp subject to a local Muslim ‘ascendancy’. The 
treaties under which the two Ruman principalities Wallachia and Moldavia had origi¬ 
nally submitted to Ottoman suzerainty had provided that they should be exempt from 
colonization by Muslims and should continue to be governed by Christian princes; and 
consequently the misgovemment and oppression from which they had suffered under an 
Ottoman dispensation had been inflicted on them first by Ruman Orthodox Christian 
and later by Greek Orthodox Christian, but never directly by Turkish Muslim, hands. 
In these circumstances it is not surprising that in A.D. 1711, when a Russian army made 
its appearance in the Lower Danube Basin for the first time since Svyatoslav’s retreat 
in a . d . 971 or 972 (see p. 127, n. 2, above), the Rumans should have shown reserve, 
whereas the Montenegrins and Herzegovinians rose in arms at the arrival, not of a Rus¬ 
sian army, but of a mere inflammatory scrap of Russian paper in the shape of a pro¬ 
clamation. It is true that in a.d. 1711 the Hospodar of Moldavia, Demetrius Cantemir, 
did throw in his lot with the Russians (see p. 162, above), and that there was a party in 
favour of the same policy in the more distant, as well as more important, principality 
of Wallachia; but the Hospodar of Wallachia, Constantine Brflncovcanu, refused to 
commit himself and eventually came down on the side of his Ottoman suzerain, and in 
this policy he seems to have had behind him a majority of the Wallachian boyars. 'As one 
of them said: “It is dangerous to declare for Russia until the Tsar’s army crosses the 
Danube. Who knows, moreover, whether Wallachia in the power of the Russians will 
be happier than under the dominion of the Turks ?” After the battle on the Pruth, one 
of Brancovan’s (BrSncovcanu’s) close adherents wrote in praise of his wisdom in "await¬ 
ing the decision of a battle in which it has finally been seen that, beneath German clothes, 
the Muscovites arc still Muscovites’’. Here in two nutshells is summed up the reason for 
Peter’s failure to win Wallachia’ (Sumner, B. H.: Peter the Great and the Ottoman Empire 
(Oxford 1949. Blackwell), p. 44, where the reader will find the references to the sources 
of the two dicta quoted above). 

1 In the Rumanian principalities, ‘Old Slavonic’ continued to be the sole current 
liturgical language of the Orthodox Christian Church down to A.D. 1679, when the Metro¬ 
politan of Moldavia, Dosithcos, published at Jassy a translation of the Liturgy into 
Rumanian. The Bible likewise was translated into Rumanian in A.D. :688. The intro¬ 
duction of the Rumanian version of the Liturgy encountered opposition, and in the 
reign of Prince Constantine Brlncoveanu of Wallachia (funeebatur a.d. 1688-1714) there 
w-as a reaction in favour of the 'Old Slavonic’ classical language. Thereafter, Greek 
ousted 'Old Slavonic’ as the language of higher secular education in the principalities, 
while 'Rumanian remnined the language of the Liturgy’ Uorga, N.: Geschichte der 
Rumanen und Hirer Kultur (Hermannstadt [Sibiul 1929, Krafft and Drotleff). pp. 233-4 
and 239-40). 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 195 
Orthodox Christian peoples to whom she repeatedly gave such effective 
help in their struggles to extricate themselves from Ottoman toils ? 

The answer appears to be that the Ottoman Orthodox Christians had 
already fallen under the spell of the Modern Western Civilization before 
Russia had offered herself to be their champion and redeemer, and that 
Russia was attractive to them—in so far as she did attract them at all— 
neither because she was Slav nor because she was Orthodox but because 
she was a pioneer in a cultural enterprise of ‘winning the West’ which 
was the goal of their own ambitions. The closer their acquaintance with 
Russia, the more alive the non-Russian Orthodox Christian peoples 
became to the superficiality of a Petrine Russia’s Western veneer. 
'Scratch a Russian and you will find a Tatar!’ 1 However much these 
former ra'iyeh might be indebted to Russia for their liberation from an 
Ottoman yoke, it was natural that they should take advantage of their 
newly gained liberty by going straight to the Western fountain-head 
instead of being content to receive the living waters of the West through 
a mud-choked Russian channel. This is perhaps the explanation of the 
apparent paradox that the prestige of Russia in Greek, Ruman, Serb, 
and Bulgar eyes diminished in proportion as Russia became a more 
familiar figure and a more potent presence in these South-East European 
Orthodox Christian peoples’ lives. 

Russian influence over them was, in fact, at its apogee in the genera¬ 
tion immediately following the Great Russo-Turkish War of a.d. 1768- 
74. The decisive victory' over a once irresistible Ottoman Power that had 
been won in this war by Russia thanks to her adoption of a Modern 
Western military technique was as thrilling for the ‘Osmanlis’ ra'iyeh 
as it was disconcerting to the ‘Osmanlis themselves; and, though the 
Russian naval expeditionary force in the Mediterranean had done the 
Morcot Greeks a poor service by irresponsibly inciting them to revolt 
without being able to give them effective aid against the avalanche of 
Albanian Muslim barbarians whom the ‘Osmanlis let loose upon them 
in retaliation, 2 the moral effect of this unfortunate Greek experience of 
Russian intervention was more than offset by the Russians’ naval and 
military successes in the war and by the vigour of their political exploita¬ 
tion of the terms of peace. 

The peace treaty concluded at Kuchuk Qaynarja on the 21st July, 
1774, stipulated (Art. 11) that Russia was to have the same treatment, 
rights, and status in the Ottoman dominions as were enjoyed at the time 
by France and Great Britain, just as if the terms of the French and 
British capitulations then in force had been incorporated in the treaty 
verbatim, and it was provided in the same article that Russian consulates, 
on the same footing as the French and British consulates, might be 
established at any place in Ottoman territory. In the subsequent Russo- 
Turkish commercial treaty of the 21st June, 1783, it was expressly agreed 1 

1 *It will take the Russians a long time to shake off from themselves the habits and 
way of thought inherited from a barbarous ancestry. Gratia It Ruue et vout trouvertz It 
Tar tare, (a c'etl une intulte aux Tartares. This is a hackneyed expression; however, it is 
a true one’ (Burnaby, F.: A Ride to Khiva (in a.d. 1875] (London 1877, Cassell), p. 82). 

J Sec V. v. 294. Details will be found in Sakcllarios, op. cit. pp. 162-204. 


196 encounters between contemporaries 

that Russian consuls should have the right, already enjoyed by the 
representatives of other capitulatory Powers, 1 of maintaining tax-free 
and otherwise privileged Ottoman servants. Russia made it her policy 
to exploit these treaty rights by using Greek Ottoman subjects as her 
instruments. Ottoman Greeks, selected by Russian consuls in the 
Ottoman Empire, were sent to Russia to be educated at the Russian 
Government’s expense, 2 and from a.d. 1818 onwards Greeks were 
appointed to Russian consulships. 3 Ships belonging to Orthodox 
Christian Ottoman subjects were licensed by the Russian authorities to 
trade under the Russian flag*—a favour which gave the first impetus 
to the boom in Greek shipping that reached its peak during the Revolu¬ 
tionary and Napoleonic Wars.* .... 

In the generation immediately preceding the Greek national uprising 
of a.d. 1821 the new maritime cities founded by the Russian Govern¬ 
ment on the north coast of the Black Sea, 6 after the acquisition of this 
seaboard by Russia in the Russo-Turkish wars of a.d. 1768-74 and a.d. 
1787-92, played an important role in the emancipation of the Greeks as 
clinics in which Greek ra'iyeh were inoculated with a revolutionary 
Western political ferment. The trade through these newly founded ports 
which sprang up between their Russian continental hinterland and the 
Ottoman shores of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean not only brought 
Ottoman Greek shipping into their harbours but attracted permanent 
Greek residents; and the Greek commercial colony at Odessa gave birth 
in a.d. 1814 to ‘the Society of Friends’ (•PiXucri 'Eraiptla), a Greek 
nationalist secret society which set itself to conduct an underground 
propaganda in Greek-inhabited Ottoman territories. The Greeks serving 
as Russian consuls in the Ottoman Empire 

‘were all initiated into the Etaireia ton Philikbn and acted as mission¬ 
aries themselves, and their propaganda found acceptance among the rest 
of the Greeks and won their confidence, because everybody believed that 
Russia was inextricably involved in these activities and that she would take 
part in the Greek conflict.’ 7 

These words were written in retrospect by Photdkos Khrysanth6pouIos, 
who played his part in the subsequent Greek War of Independence as 
aide-de-camp to Kolokotronis; and the story of Photikos’s early life is a 
personal illustration of the stimulus imparted to Ottoman Greeks by 
contact with Russia in this generation. 

Photdkos, as he records in his memoirs, 8 was the son, born in a.d. 
1798, of a Moreot Greek Orthodox Christian priest. His native village 
was Maghouliana in the interior of the peninsula, and he received a 
Greek primary education there before going on to the recently founded 
Greek higher school at Vytlna. By this date the Moreot Greeks were 
becoming political-minded. 


« See pp. 172-3. above. 1 Sec Finlay, op. cit., vol. y, p. 267. 

1 See Khrysanthdpoulos, Ph.: Vtwo/ivjjMOKv/xara (Athens 1899, Sakellarios, 2 vole.), 
vol. i, p. 16. 

* See Finlay, op. cit., vol. v, pp. 280-1. * Sec pp. 175-7. above. 

6 Kherson was founded in A.D. 1778, Nikolayev in A.D. 1789, Odessa in A.D. 1792. 
» Khrysanthdpoulos, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 16. 

* Khrysanthdpoulo*. op. cit., Introduction, vol. i, pp. ix-xiii. 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE GREEKS 197 

‘It was customary for all the inhabitants of a village or a small country- 
town to meet after the end of divine service. They came out of church, 
stopped in the churchyard, and talked together there; and, if the more 
intelligent among them happened to have heard any foreign news—per¬ 
haps about a war between the Westerners (QpayKOi) and the Turks—they 
used to tell it, and everybody was pleased, above all when it was Russia 
that had won a battle. When that happened, they used to join with the 
priest in a prayer to God to give our co-religionists strength to overthrow 
our enemies the Turks.’ 1 

At Vytfna in this atmosphere the young Photdkos imbibed political 
ideas which made his father anxious to get the boy out of the country 
for fear that he might fall foul of the Turks; and so, in a.d. 1813, 
Photikos was taken, with other young Moreot Greeks, to Russia by a 
Moreot business man, established there, who had been back in the 
Morea on a visit. In Russia Photakos went into business in the inland 
Bessarabian town of Kishinydv, but, hearing of the existence of the 
Philikl Etaircfa, he migrated to Odessa and was initiated. In a.d. 1820 he 
was sent by the society as their emissary to the Morea to pass the word 
that the 25th March, 1821, was to be ‘the day’. His expenses were paid 
by a rich Odcssan Greek business man, and he sailed from Odessa to 
Hydhra on board an Hydhriot ship. 

Photikos’ account of the effect of life in Russia on himself and his 
compatriots is as convincing as it is vivid: 

'The Greeks . . . always longed to go to Russia. There we could work 
and earn our bread and after a time forget our fear and cease to be ra'iyeh 
of the Turks. We could cleanse ourselves inside and outside, realise that 
we were human beings, walk with a confident step, and catch the new 
atmosphere from one another. We could hear the bells of the churches 
ringing freely; we could go to their churches and give thanks in the liturgy 
of our religion with a devotion that came from the heart. And, when we 
had taken our fill of all these blessings, we could begin to consider how to 
liberate our parents, brothers, and relatives and our beloved country, so 
that she too might recover her splendour, like Russia. 

'This terrible mental cancer prayed upon our lives, and we could never 
conclude our reflections without our eyes being clouded with tears. Why 
should we be slaves of the Turks, the most barbarous nation in the World ? 
This weeping and lamentation of ours, and all our other miseries, filled 
every place where Greeks were gathered together. Equality, fraternity, 
loyalty, and mutual affection were general among us, and after the day’s 
work we were continually meeting in our leisure hours and discussing 
the liberation of our country. Everyone sent his savings to his birthplace, 
to his parents and other relatives; and he sent his native commune and 
the village church a few books, a little lamp, or a little bell. And so we 
continued for the present. There in Russia our national consciousness 
grew, and our hearts burnt unqucndhably within us. Had Russia not been 
there, or had she been another nation with another religion, it is question¬ 
able whether we should have secured our liberation or preserved our 
nationality. Where else, indeed, should we have brought our embryonic 
liberty to birth ?’* 

* Khrys*»nth6poulos, op. cit., vol. i, p. 35 ! C P- P- * 5 - 

* Khry*anth< 5 pou!o», op. cit., vol. i, pp. 16-18. 



198 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

In Russia, on this new ground so lately won from Nomadism for the 
agriculture, commerce, and industry of a sedentary civilization, Otto¬ 
man Greek immigrants at the opening of the nineteenth century ex¬ 
perienced the exhilaration of breathing fresh air; but, if Phdtakos is a 
faithful interpreter of their state of mind, they were still unaware of the 
source of the life-giving breeze. Though they were inhaling it within the 
expanding borders of a Russian Orthodox Christendom, its provenance 
was not Russia and its ozone was not Orthodoxy. The mighty rushing 
wind that was sweeping out of the Russian forests across the Ukrainian 
steppes and over the sea to Greece had not been raised by any local 
atmospheric conditions; it had come from afar, and a scientific inquirer 
bent on tracing it back to its origin would have had to make a pilgrimage 
from Odessa northwards overland to Riga, and from Riga westwards 
overseas, to find the distant source of this spiritual elixir in Holland and 
Britain and America. The atmosphere in early nineteenth-century 
Russia that inspired the Ottoman Greeks was a Western atmosphere to 
which Russia was merely giving passage; and in succumbing to this 
atmosphere they were opting, even if unconsciously, not for Russia, but 
for the West. 


3. The Modern West and the Hindu World 1 

Likenesses and Differences in the Situations of a Hindu Society under 
British Rule and an Ottoman Orthodox Christendom 

The circumstances in which the Hindu World encountered the 
Modern West were in some points remarkably similar to those in which 
the main body of Orthodox Christendom underwent the same experience. 
The Hindu World, too, had entered into its universal state by the time 
when the impact of the Modern Western Civilization upon it began to 
make itself felt there; 2 in India, as in the non-Russian part of Orthodox 
Christendom, this universal state had been imposed by alien empire- 
builders who were children of the Iranic Muslim Civilization; and in 

« Sec xi, maps 52A and S3. 

* If we arc right in our view that a universal state was imposed on the Hindu World 
by alien hands in the form of the Timurid Mughal Empire, and also right in equating 
the effective establishment of the Mughal Rij with Akbar’s conoucst of Gujerat in 
a.d. 1572. this event in Hindu history did not occur till seventy-four years after the 
first landfall of Western ocean-faring mariners on the west coast of the sub-continent; 
but da Gama’s arrival at Calicut in A.D. 1498 did not produce the sensation in India that 
it produced in Venice and in Egypt, where it was immediately realized that the rounding 
of the Cape of Good Hope by Portuguese ships was a threat to all parties commercially 
interested in the traditional short route between India and Western Europe via the In¬ 
dian Ocean snd the Levant. The continental-minded Central Asian Muslim conquerors 
of the interior of the Indian sub-continent were as insensitive to landfalls on the 
coast as they were sensitive to passages of the Hindu Kush; and, though their latest 
representative, the Timurid Mughal empire-builder Bibur, crossed the Hindu Kush 
only six years, and descended from Kabul upon the Panjab only twenty-one years, after 
da Gama had arrived in India by sea, there is no mention of the Portuguese explorer’s 
feat in the memoirs of the Central Asian soldier. Even in the eyes of Babur’s grandson 
Akbar, the founder of the Mughal Rfij, the handful of Westerners squatting on sufferance 
in one or two ports on the fringes of his enormous realm were still little more than 
objects of curiosity as the pedlars of ingenious toys and the missionaries of an interesting 
religion. Indeed, the impact of the West on Mughal India hardly began to make itself felt 
seriously before the Mughal power had begun to go into decline after the death of 
Awrangzib in A.D. 1707. 


THE MODERN WEST AND THE HINDUS 199 
Mughal India, as in Ottoman Orthodox Christendom, the subjects of 
these Muslim rulers were feeling the attraction of their masters’ alien 
culture at the time when the Modem West appeared above their horizon, 
but subsequently transferred their cultural allegiance to this later-risen 
star as the West manifestly increased and the Islamic Society manifestly 
decreased in potency. These striking points of similarity between the 
two situations throw into relief, however, certain not less striking points 
of difference. 

For example, when the Ottoman Orthodox Christians made the cul¬ 
tural change of front in which they turned away from the Ottoman to¬ 
ward the Modern Western way of life, they had to overcome a traditional 
antipathy to the West which had become ingrained in the hearts of their 
ancestors as a result of an unfortunate experience of the West in a 

S revious encounter with it in its medieval phase. By contrast, the 
lindus, in their corresponding cultural reorientation, had no such un¬ 
happy memories to live down; for the encounter between the Hindu 
World and the West that began on the day when da Gama made his 
landfall at Calicut was virtually the first contact that had ever occurred 
between these two societies. 

Moreover, this difference in the antecedents is overshadowed by a still 
more important difference in the sequel. In the history of a non-Russian 
Orthodox Christendom the alien universal state which this society 
brought upon itself 1 remained in the hands of its original Iranic Muslim 
founders until it went into dissolution after reaching its natural term. An 
Ottoman Empire which fell on evil days before the close of the sixteenth 
century, when its classical regime of government through the PSdishah’s 
Slave-Household broke down after the death of Suleyman the Magnifi¬ 
cent, was restored in the course of the seventeenth century when, under 
the leadership of the House of Kdprulu, the free Muslim community in 
the Empire took over the reins of government 2 and secured effective 
assistance in its formidable task by taking the Phanariot leaders of a sub¬ 
ject Orthodox Christian community into a junior partnership with it¬ 
self. 3 The Mughal Empire achieved no corresponding recover}’ from the 
similar anarchy into which it fell after the death of Awrangzib, and, 
while the Hindu, like the Orthodox Christian, universal state lived out its 
life to the term of its natural expectation and likewise remained to the 
end in alien hands, there was in this case a transfer of control from one 
pair of alien hands to another. 

The empire which the Timurid war-lords’ feeble successors failed to 
hold together was reconstituted by British business men who stepped 
into Akbar’s shoes when they became aware that the framework of law 
and order in India, without which no Westerners could carry on their 
trade there, was going to be restored by the French if the British did not 

* The subjugation of the main body of Orthodox Christendom by the 'Osmanlis ia 
accounted for by the contemporary native historians Dhotikas and Phrantzls as being 
God’s judgement on His Orthodox Christian people for their sins; and this verdict may 
be accepted by an historian who does not believe that the Orthodox Christians were in any 
special sense God’s Chosen People if the particular sins for which the Orthodox Christ¬ 
ians had to pay this price may be identified with the two political vices of autocracy and 
factiousness. 1 See V. vi. 208-9. 

J Sec II. ii. 222-8; III. iii. 47-48; V. v. 154-5; «nd PP- *62-3, above. 



200 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
forestall these rivals by doing the work themselves. Thus the Westerniza¬ 
tion of the Hindu World entered on its critical stage in a period in which 
India was under Western rule, and in consequence the reception of the 
Modern Western culture was initiated in India, as in Russia, from above 
downwards, and not from below upwards, as in an Ottoman Orthodox 
Christendom. 

The Reception of a Modern Western Culture and its Political Consequences 

In this situation the Brahman and Banya castes of the Hindu Society, 
between them, succeeded in playing the part in Hindu history for which, 
in non-Russian Orthodox Christian history, the Phanariot Greeks made 
an unsuccessful bid. Under all political regimes in India, one of the 
prerogatives of the Brahmans had been to serve as ministers of state. 
They had played this part in the Indie World before playing it in an 
affiliated Hindu Society; and, after the breakdown of the Hindu 
Civilization in the twelfth century of the Christian Era 1 and the subse¬ 
quent progressive intrusion of Iranic Muslim invaders into a disintegrat¬ 
ing Hindu Society’s domain, 3 these alien intruders found it convenient, 
if not indispensable, to follow in this point the practice of the Hindu 
states which they were supplanting. Brahman ministers and minor offi¬ 
cials in the service of Muslim rulers made this alien rule less odious than 
it would otherwise have been to the Hindu majority of these Indian 
Muslim princes’ subjects, because these Brahman intermediaries under¬ 
stood how to handle their fellow Hindus and at the same time enjoyed 
a prestige in their eyes which reconciled the rank-and-file to following 
the dominant caste’s lead in accommodating themselves to an irksome 
alien political yoke. In making this use of the Brahmans the Mughal R 5 j 
followed the precedent of the parochial Indian Muslim states whose 
former dominions it had united under its own rule, and the British R 5 j, 
in its turn, followed the precedent of the Mughal Raj, 3 while British 
economic enterprise in India, both public and private, opened up 
corresponding opportunities for the Banyas. 

As a consequence of the transfer of the government of India to British 
hands, the policy of the British regime in making English, instead of 
Persian, the official language of the Indian imperial administration, and 
giving Western literature a preference over Persian and Sanskrit litera¬ 
ture as a medium of Indian higher education, 4 had as great an effect on 
Hindu cultural history as was made upon Russian cultural history by the 
Westernizing policy of Peter the Great. In the Hindu, as in the Russian, 
Society, Western letters, and, with them, a veneer of Western life, came 
into vogue among the dominant classes through the fiat of an autocratic 
oecumenical government and not through the personal initiative of 
private individuals, which was the agency through which the ra'tyeh of 
the Ottoman Porte had made themselves acquainted with the Modern 

* See IV. iv. 99-100. * See xi, maps 44 and 45. 

3 In enlisting the services of Hindus in the administration of British India, the British 
authorities did not deliberately give the Brahmans any special preference, but the 
Brahmans’ hereditary ascendancy in the Hindu Society enabled them once again to 
secure the lion’s share of the opportunity for themselves. 

* For these measures, see V. v. 516, n. 1 and VI. vii. 243. 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE HINDUS 201 
Western culture. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the Porte 
appointed Phanariot Greeks to posts of high responsibility and influence 
in the Ottoman public service because these Phanariots were already 
familiar with a Western World with which the Porte now found itself 
constrained to transact business. In the nineteenth century, high-caste 
Hindus went in for a Western education because a British regime in 
India had ruled that a familiarity with the English language and litera¬ 
ture should be the key to entry into the British Indian public service. 

While the Westernization of India thus proceeded from above down¬ 
wards on lines originally laid down by a British Raj primarily for its 
own administrative purposes, the process did not remain confined within 
limits that would have sufficed for the supply of minor civil servants to 
‘the Serkar’ and subordinate clerks to private British business houses. 
The governmental and commercial life of India could not be put upon a 
Western basis without introducing a Western leaven into Indian life over 
a wider range. The Westernization of Indian business and government 
called into existence in India two Western liberal professions, the 
University Faculty and the Bar; and in a Westernized Indian business 
activity based on private enterprise the most profitable openings could 
not be made a monopoly for European British subjects, as the highest 
positions in the Indian Civil Sen-ice were reserved for them in effect 
down to a.d. 1917. In these circumstances the Hindu community showed 
its ability by successfully turning its administrative, legal, and com¬ 
mercial talents to account under the exotic conditions set by a Western 
commercial and political ascendancy; and, long before the transfer of 
the government of India from English to Indian hands in the course 
of the thirty years a.d. 1917-47, there had grown up in India a new class 
of Westernized Hindu lawyers, business men, and industrialists as well 
as Westernized Indian members of the Imperial public service. 

It was inevitable that this new element in the Hindu Society, whose 
distinctive characteristic was its Western education, should aspire, as in 
Ottoman Orthodox Christendom the Phanariot Greeks had aspired in 
their day, to take over the oecumenical empire under which they were 
living from the alien hands by which it had been built, and to turn it 
into one of the parochial states of a Westernizing World on the constitu¬ 
tional pattern prevalent at the time at which this political ambition took 
conscious shape. At the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries 
the Phanariots had dreamed an already anachronistic dream of turning 
the Ottoman Empire into an eighteenth-century Western enlightened 
monarchy. 1 At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the 
Westernizing political leaders of the Hindu World paid homage to a 
change in Western political ideals by setting themselves the far more 
difficult task of turning the British Indian Empire into a democratic 
Western national state. 

At a date less than five years after the completion of the transfer of the 
Government of India from English to Indian hands on the 15th August, 
1947, it was still far too early to attempt to forecast the outcome of this 
momentous political enterprise; but it was already possible to say that 
« See VI. vii. 29-31, and pp. 187-9, »bove. 



202 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
Hindu statesmanship had been more successful than foreign well-wishers 
could have dared to hope in its efforts to salvage as much as possible 
of the political unity that had been perhaps the most precious British 
gift to an Indian sub-continent. 

As the transfer of political power had become imminent, this political 
unity had come into danger of being disrupted by two fissures in Indian 
political life which had been politically more or less innocuous so long 
as the Raj had been held in British hands. One of these fissures was the 
geographical division of India between territories of two political categor¬ 
ies: the British Indian provinces and the autonomous Indian princi¬ 
palities that were in treaty relations with the British Government. The 
other was the non-territorial division of India between two geographi¬ 
cally intermingled communities, the Hindus and the Indian Muslims, 
and the further subdivision of the Hindu community, likewise on non¬ 
territorial lines, into a number of castes, ranging from Brahmans to 
‘Untouchables’. These two lines of division cut across one another, and 
they were also of different age and unequal gravity. The geographical 
division between provinces and principalities was an accidental legacy 
of the history of the British conquest of India in the course of a hundred 
years beginning with the British occupation of Bengal at as recent a date 
as a.d. 1757-60. On the other hand the communal division of the people 
of India into a Hindu and a Muslim millet was as old as the Iranic 
Muslim conquest of Hindustan towards the close of the twelfth century 
of the Christian Era, 1 while the communal sub-division of the Hindu 
millet into castes was a legacy from the history of the antecedent Indie 
Civilization. It was not surprising that the Government of the Indian 
Union that came into existence on the 15th August, 1947, should have 
dealt more successfully with the problem of the princes than with the 
problems of the Muslim millet and the Depressed Classes; it was, how¬ 
ever, remarkable that the existence of these two communal problems 
should not have worked greater havoc than it did work at this critical 
moment in Indian liistory. 

By the year a.d. 1952 the Central Government of the Indian Union 
had already imposed its authority, by a show of force, on the Deccani 
state of Hyderabad, which was by far the largest, most populous, and 
most powerful of all the autonomous principalities inherited by the 
Indian Union from the British Raj within the frontiers with which the 
Union had emerged as a fully self-governing state member of the British 
Commonwealth of Nations; and it was actively engaged in carrying out 
a Gleichschaltung of the rest. This merger of the existing principalities 
in the new Union was not inequitable—whatever the princes’ legal rights 
might be—since Indians who were subjects of ex-client princes of a 
former British Raj had as strong a moral claim as Indians who had been 
subjects of the British Raj itself to share in the self-government which 
the former British rulers of India had conceded to the Indian people; 
and the change seemed unlikely to cause any serious regrets or to pro¬ 
voke any dangerous reactions, since there were few principalities, if any, 
in which a majority of the inhabitants might have been expected to opt 

» See IV. iv. 99. 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE HINDUS 203 
for a continuance of the ancieti regime. On the other hand the Hindu 
leaders had been less successful in dealing with their Indian Muslim 
counterparts, since it had been beyond their power to coerce them, and 
had proved beyond their ability to persuade them, into renouncing their 
demand that a separate Muslim successor-state of the British Indian 
Empire should be constituted out of territories in which the Muslims 
were in a majority over the Hindus. 

The Indian Muslims’ motive in insisting upon the creation of Pakistan 
was a fear arising from a consciousness of weakness. They had not for¬ 
gotten how, in the eighteenth century of the Christian Era, the Mughal 
Raj had failed to maintain by the sword a dominion over India which 
the sword alone had won, and they were aware that, by the same arbitra¬ 
ment, the greater part of the Mughals’ former domain would have be¬ 
come the prize of Maratha and Sikh Hindu successor-states if British 
military intervention had not given the course of Indian political history 
a dramatically different turn by re-establishing an oecumenical govern¬ 
ment of India under British auspices. The Indian Muslims realized 
that, but for this, they would not only have lost their former dominion 
over the Hindus but would have paid for their harshness in the exercise 
of it by suffering a reversal of roles in which it would have been their 
turn to taste the tribulations of ‘under dog’. They also knew that, 
although they had been fortunate enough to escape from a perilous pass 
with no worse a fate than to find themselves placed on a political parity 
with the Hindus under the rule of a third party, they had again allowed 
themselves to be outstripped by the Hindus in a phase of the perennial 
conflict between these two Indian communities in which a British arbiter 
had decreed that the pen should be substituted for the sword as the 
weapon to be employed in a trial of strength in which the destinies of the 
two parties were as seriously at stake as if this new-fangled academic 
competition had not replaced the old-fashioned ordeal by battle. 

On the morrow of the British occupation of Bengal in a.d. 1757-60 the 
Bengali Hindus who had thereby come under British rule had promptly 
divined that a mastery of Modern Western arts w’ould be the key to 
success in a w-orld that was passing under Western control and was being 
remoulded to a Western pattern; and, by the date of the transfer of 
power in India in a.d. 1947, the Panjabi Hindus likewise had been 
profiting for all but a hundred years from the opportunities for Western¬ 
ization that had been afforded to them by the British conquest of their 
country in the fifth decade of the nineteenth century. By comparison, 
the Indian Muslims—handicapped by an intellectual inertia that was 
the legacy of a former military and political ascendancy, and demoralized, 
instead of being stimulated, by the shock of their military and political 
debacle—had been slow in taking their cue in a race in which the victory 
would fall to the most successful Indian adepts in the alien technique 
of Modern Western life; and, though in the course of the nineteenth 
century the Indian Muslims did wake up and start to run, they were 
too late to have been able to make up for lost time by the date in the 
twentieth century when they were confronted with the prospect of 
having to compete with the Hindus once again, as in the eighteenth 



204 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
century, without there being an all-powerful British arbiter to hold the 
ring and to guarantee the weaker party against the appalling risk of being 
made to pay the uttermost penalty for incompetence. 

For these reasons the Indian Muslims insisted in a.d. 1947 on having 
a separate successor-state of their own, and the consequent partition of 
the former British Indian Empire between the two new Dominions of 
India and Pakistan threatened to reproduce, on a sub-continental scale, 
the tragic consequences that had followed from the partition of the 
Ottoman Empire during the century beginning with the Greek uprising 
in a.d. 1821. In a twentieth-century British India, as in a nineteenth- 
century Ottoman Orthodox Christendom, the attempt to sort out geo¬ 
graphically intermingled millets into territorially separate and severally 
self-contained national states led to the drawing of frontiers that were 
execrable from the administrative and economic points of view; even at 
this price, huge minorities were left on the wrong sides of the new 
dividing lines; there was a panic flight of millions of refugees who 
abandoned their homes and property, were harried by embittered adver¬ 
saries in the course of a terrible trek, and arrived destitute in the un¬ 
familiar country in which they had to start life again among unknown 
co-religionists; and there was one section of the border between India 
and Pakistan where even this calamity was eclipsed by the still greater 
evil of an undeclared war for the possession of the autonomous princi¬ 
pality of Kashmir, whose Muslim population was under the rule of a 
Hindu dynasty. By the year a.d. 1952, however, effective efforts had 
been made by Indian statesmen, both at Delhi and at Karachi, to save 
India from following this dreadful Ottoman course to the bitter end. 
The still un-uprooted minorities on both sides of the line had been 
sufficiently reassured to bring the flow of refugees to a halt; the dispute 
over Kashmir had been referred to the United Nations Organization 
for settlement by conciliation; and, while this task had proved to be a 
depressingly baffling one, it was, on the other hand, encouraging to 
observe that the political malady of Nationalism, which had split India 
into two, did not here show any signs of carrying its disintegrating 
effect farther, as it had carried it in the Ottoman Empire, by impelling 
the divers nationalities embraced within each of the two principal millets 
to demand separate territorial sovereignties in their turn. 

In the Ottoman Empire, as we have seen, the several nationalities 
comprised in the Orthodox Christian Millet-i-Rum had broken away 
simultaneously from their Muslim masters and from one another, and 
the Muslims themselves had eventually followed this unfortunate 
example by developing separate Turkish, Arab, Albanian, and Kurdish 
national consciousnesses. In a twentieth-century India the potentialities 
of disruption were at least as great within the bosom of the Hindu and 
the Muslim community alike. The Bengali Muslim differed from the 
Panjabi Muslim as greatly as the Bengali Hindu differed from the 
Panjabi Hindu or Sikh; and in the Hindu World there were linguistic 
barriers far sharper than those dividing the Northern Indian speakers of 
divers dialects of the same Aryan language. The Dravidian languages of 
the South were members of an entirely different family. Yet, notwith- 


THE MODERN WEST AND THE HINDUS 205 
standing the existence of these latent incentives to disruption, a politi¬ 
cally emancipated Hindu community was not showing violent fissiparous 
tendencies on lines of nationality any more than on lines of caste. Thus, 
at the time of writing, Indian prospects were, on the whole, encouraging 
from a short-term political point of view; and, if the impact of the 
Modern West did still threaten the Hindu World with serious perils, 
these were to be looked for not so much on the political surface of life as 
in its economic subsoil and its spiritual depths, and were perhaps likely 
there to take some time in coming to a head. 

The Gulf between a Hindu and a Post-Christian Western Weltanschauung 

The obvious special perils of Westernization which the Hindu World 
had to apprehend were two. In the first place the Hindu and the Western 
Civilization had hardly any common cultural background and were 
strikingly alien from one another in £thos in this age. In the second place 
the Hindus who had mastered the intellectual content of an exotic 
Modern Western culture with a virtuosity that rivalled the performance 
of the Phanariots were a tiny minority perched on the backs of a vast 
majority of ignorant and destitute peasants as precariously as, in the 
constitution of the Human Psyche, the Consciousness hovers over the 
abyss of the Subconscious. By the date of India’s attainment of political 
independence as a state member of a comity of Western and Westerniz¬ 
ing nations, the radiation of the Western culture into the Hindu World 
had affected only the top layer of the society. Yet there was no ground 
for expecting to see the process of Western cultural penetration come to 
a stop at that level, while there were strong grounds for forecasting that, 
when it began to leaven the peasant mass beneath, it would also begin 
there to produce novel and revolutionary effects. 

The cultural gulf between the Hindu Society and the Modern Western 
Society at the time when the top layer of the Hindu Society had begun 
to be appreciably affected by Western influence had been wider than 
that between the Russian Orthodox Christian, Ottoman Orthodox 
Christian, Ottoman Muslim, and Modern Western societies whose 
encounters with one another we have surveyed in previous sections of 
this chapter. 

Differentiated though these four societies had been by the diversity 
of their individual experiences and achievements, they had retained 
nevertheless an affinity with one another in virtue of a common cultural 
heritage derived from a single pair of antecedent civilizations, the 
Hellenic and the Syriac. 1 By contrast, the Hindu Society was not re¬ 
lated either to the Western or to the Iranic Muslim Society by any 
comparable degree of kinship; for, though a tincture of both the Hellenic 
and the Syriac culture could be traced in the veins of the Hindu body 
social too, the dilution was in both cases weak. 2 Moreover, the difference 

* Sec pp. 90-91, below. 

* The western fringe of the domain of the Hindu Civilirat ion’s predecessor the Indie 
Society had been annexed by Cyrus II and by Darius I to an Achaemenian Empire which 
had served as the Syriac Society’s universal state (see VI. vii. 63, 634, and 649), 
and the transmission of some measure of Syriac cultural influence from the Indie 
Society to the Hindu was attested by the Syriac provenance of the Khardshthi Alphabet 



206 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
in £thos between the Hindu Weltanschauung and the Western Weltan¬ 
schauung in the Late Modern version in which this first began to make 
an impression on Hindu souls was no mere diversity; it was an outright 
antithesis; for by the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 
of the Christian Era the Modern West, as we have seen, 1 had fabricated 
a secular version of its cultural heritage from which Religion was 
eliminated in order to give primacy to Technology, whereas the Hindu 
Society, like its Indie predecessor, was and remained religious to the 
core—so much so, indeed, as to be open to the charge of ‘religiosity’ if, 
as that pejorative word implies, there can in truth be such a thing as an 
excessive concentration of psychic energy on a spiritual activity which is 
Man’s most important pursuit. 1 

This antithesis between a passionately religious and a deliberately 
secular outlook on life cut deeper than any diversity of vein between one 
religion and another; and in this point the Hindu, the Islamic, and the 
Early Modern Western Christian cultures were more in sympathy with 
one another than any one of them was with the secular culture of the 
West in its late modern phase. Though the religion of the Hindu World 
was of Indie provenance, while the religions of the Islamic and Early 
Modern Western Christian worlds were derived from Judaism, this 
diversity of historical origins was of less moment than the consensus of 
all three societies in taking it for granted that Religion—whatever the 
orthodox presentation of it might be held to be—was the mainspring 
and meaning of Man’s existence. On the strength of this common belief, 
it had been possible for Hindus to become converts to Islam and to 
Roman Catholic Christianity without subjecting themselves to an in¬ 
tolerable spiritual tension. The Muslims of Eastern Bengal and the 
Roman Catholics of Goa were living evidence of this; for both these 
communities were descended from Hindu converts with only a slight 
admixture of Central Asian blood in the one case and West European 
blood in the other. 

This proven ability of Hindus to make their way on to alien cultural 
ground by a religious approach was significant, because, if religiosity 
was the Hindu Civilization’s chief distinguishing mark, its next most 
conspicuous feature was aloofness. This characteristic aloofness was, no 
doubt, overcome in the intellectual compartment of their spiritual life 
by those Hindus who, from the latter part of the eighteenth century of 
the Christian Era onwards, acquired a secular Modern Western educa¬ 
tion and thereby qualified for playing a part in the reconstruction of the 
political and economic sides of Indian life on a Modem Western basis; 

(see V. V. too). The Hellenic culture had bitten deeper into Indie life; it shared the 
credit for the genesis of the Mshiyina, as was attested by the Hellenic element in the 
style of Mahayanian Buddhist art (sec 111 . iii. 131 and 247, n. 2; V. v. 134, 196, and 
4S1). This Hellenistic art, however, had become an heirloom, not of the Hindu World, 
but of the Far East, for the Indie Society had succeeded in expelling this intrusive 
Hellenic element from its own body social before going into dissolution, and the 
religion of Hinduism, which had been the symbol and the agent of this anti-Hellenic 
reaction in Indie souls, had also served as the chrysalis for incubating the Indie Society's 
Hindu successor. 

1 On p. 118, with n. 9, above. 

* This vein of religiosity in the Indie and Hindu civilization has been noticed in 
III. iii. 384-5. 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE HINDUS 207 
but the recruits of this unhappy intelligentsia performed a valuable 
social service as cultural intermediaries between the Hindu and the 
Modern Western World at the cost of a schism in their souls which did 
not afflict cither the Bengali Muslim or the Goanese Roman Catholic 
descendants of apostates from the Hindu, but not from the religious, 
outlook on life. This Hindu intelligentsia bred by the British Raj re¬ 
mained aloof in their hearts from the secular Modern Western way of 
life with which their minds had become familiar; and this discord pro¬ 
duced a deep-seated spiritual malaise in Hindu souls 1 which could not 
be cured by the political panacea of obtaining full self-government for an 
Indian national state organized on a contemporary Western pattern. 
Indeed, the relaxation of a political tension might actually bring the 
spiritual tension to a head by leaving a Westernizing Hindu intellect 
tite-d-tite with an unconscionably religious Hindu soul, without any 
further possibility of avoiding a painful searching of heart through find¬ 
ing a scapegoat in an English interloper whose alien regime might 
plausibly be held responsible for all Indian ills, psychological as well as 
political. 

The Aloofness of a Reformed British Civil Service in India 

The unyielding spiritual aloofness of Western-educated Hindu minds 
would in any case have been a formidable problem both for the human 
beings whose Hindu souls were being racked by an unresolved discord 
and for the Hindu Society in which these inharmonious ‘intellectuals’ 
were called upon to take the lead in an age of Hindu history in which a 
collision between the Hindu and the secular Modern Western culture 
was the dominant event in social as well as personal life. The situation 
had been aggravated, however, by the mischance that this unmitigated 
spiritual aloofness on the Hindu side had been matched by an accentuated 
spiritual aloofness in the souls of the Western rulers with whom the 
Hindu intelligentsia had to do business under the regime of the British 
R 3 j. Between the year a.d. 1786, in which Cornwallis assumed the 

« The spiritual malaise which is the occupational disease of an intelligentsia has been 
noticed in V. v. 154-9, and is examined further on pp. 338-43, below. The sharpness of 
the psychological tension in twentieth-century Hindu souls that had been Westernized 
intellectually while remaining Hindu in feeling, intuition, and sensation (to use C. G. 
Jung’s categories) may be gauged from the testimony of nineteenth-century Russian 
souls in which the gulf between a traditional way of life and an exotic Western Weltan¬ 
schauung was much less wide, and the tension therefore proportionately less severe. 
Unhappy though they were in almost everything else, the nineteenth-century Russian 
intelligentsia were fortunate in being gifted with a power of artistic expression and in 
being moved to use this gift as a vent for relieving their spiritual malaise by discharging 
their feelings in works of literature. This literary secretion from a culturally sick body 
social was a pearl of great price for the historian as well as for the psychologist and the 
man of letters. Out of the vast wealth of evidence which it offered to the student of 
encounters between contemporaries of diverse culture, we may file here one passage 
culled from the memoirs of Alexander Herzen (vivebat a.d. 1812-70), the natural son 
of a Russian nobleman by a girl from Stuttgart: 

'In Russia men exposed to the influence of this mighty Western movement became 
original, but not historical, figures. Foreigners at home, foreigners in other lands, idle 
spectators, spoilt for Russia by Western prejudices and for the West by Russian habits, 
they were a sort of intellectual superfluity and were lost in artificial life, in sensual 
pleasure, and in unbearable egoism' (Herzen, Alexander: My Past and Thoughts, 
translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett (London 1924, Chat to and Windus, 
6 vols.), vol. i, p. 94 ). 



208 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
governor-generalship of British India with a mandate to reform the 
administration, 1 and the year a.d. 1858, which saw the completion of 
the transfer of British political authority in India from the East India 
Company to the Crown, there was a profound, and on the whole un¬ 
toward, change in the attitude of the European-born British ruling class 
in India towards their Indian-born fellow subjects. 

In the eighteenth century the English in India, like their predecessors 
the Mughals and the Portuguese, had followed unselfconsciously the 
custom of the country, not excluding the custom of abusing power, but 
they had also likewise been on familiar terms of personal intercourse 
with the Indians whom they unscrupulously cheated and oppressed. In 
the course of the nineteenth century they achieved a notable moral rally. 
The intoxication with suddenly acquired power and the demoraliza¬ 
tion by suddenly opened facilities for illicit personal enrichment which 
had disgraced the first generation of English rulers in Bengal were 
successfully overcome by a new ideal of moral integrity, which required 
the English civil servant in India to look upon his power as a public 
responsibility and not as a personal opportunity. The stages in this 
moral redemption of the British Raj in India by British consciences can 
be followed from the India Act of a.d. 1784 to the introduction, in a.d. 
1855,* a competitive examination as the gate of entry into the Indian 
Civil Service ; 3 but pari passu we can also follow the waning of personal 
familiarity between English residents in India and their Indian neigh¬ 
bours, until the all too humanly Indianized English 'nabob’ has changed, 
out of recognition, into the professionally irreproachable and personally 
unapproachable English civil servant who said goodbye in a.d. 1947 to 
an India to whom he had dedicated his working life without making her 
his home. 

In the eighteenth century, after the decay of the Mughal Raj had gone 
far enough to break down the containing walls of the factories in which 
Western merchants had hitherto been living in isolation 4 like their 
counterparts in the Sloboda at Moscow before the days of Peter the 
Great, 5 the English who went to India in divers capacities—in the ser¬ 
vice of the East India Company, in the service of Indian princes, or as 
free-lance military and political adventurers hoping to carve out suc¬ 
cessor-states of the Mughal Empire on their own account 6 —were all of 

1 A second date which was fateful for the future course of relations between Indians 
and English was the year a.d. 1709, which saw Wellesley initiate a systematic conquest 
of India by British arms. While the British occupation of Bengal in a.d. 1757-60 might 
perhaps not inaccurately be described as an act of empire-building by inadvertence, this 
description certainly would not apply to the British conquest of the rest of the sub¬ 
continent during the fifty years a.d. 1799-1849. This military programme was de¬ 
liberately taken in hand in a.d. 1799 with an eye to forestalling a re-entry of the French 
into India, and it was deliberately carried forward after A.D. 18:4 in order to round off 
a British Raj with which the French were thereafter no longer in a position to interfere. 

2 See Blunt, Sir E.: The Indian Civil Service (London 1937, Faber), p. 46. 

> The British Indian Civil Service has been noticed in this Study, in other contexts, 
in V. v. 47~48 and VI. vii. 364-5. 

4 See Spear, T. G. P.: The Nabobs: A Study 0/ the Social Life of the English in Eigh¬ 
teenth-Century India (London 1932, Milford), p. 22. * See p. 130, above. 

6 See Compton, H. E.: A Particular Account of the European Military Adventurers of 
Hindustan, 1784-2803 (London 1892 (1st cd.) and 1896 (2nd cd.), Fisher Unwin); 
Grey, C., and Garrett, H. L. O.: European Adventurers in Northern India, 1785-1849 
(Lahore 1929, Punjab Government Press). 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE HINDUS 209 
one mind in looking forward to making themselves at home in the 
country, as other foreign conquerors of India had done before them. In 
this Indianizing movement the free-lance adventurers went the fastest 
and the farthest. 1 For example, Claude Martin (vivebat a.d. 1735-1800), 
a French soldier of fortune who, after the fall of Pondicherry in a.d. 
1761, had taken military service first with the British and then with the 
Nawab of Oudh, 2 ‘was nearly as Indianizcd as the Nawab was Euro¬ 
peanized'. 3 At Lucknow, Martin had four concubines and a household of 
eunuchs and slaves; but he combined this Mughal pomp and luxury 
with a cosmopolitan culture, for he also had 4,000 Western books 
(Latin, French, Italian, and English), a collection of Persian and Sanskrit 
manuscripts, and a hundred oil paintings, including works by Zoffany 
and the two Daniells. 4 Among the English servants of the British East 
India Company in Martin’s generation the ideal of emulating in India 
the career of the London city merchant who became an English country 
squire was replaced, after the Company’s victory over a Mughal naw 5 b 
at the Battle of Plassey ( commissum a.d. 1757), by the ideal of becoming 
a ‘nabob’. 5 

Instead of continuing to marry Goan Portuguese Christian wives, the 
Company’s English servants now took, like Martin, to keeping zenanas 
alia MorescaS Till circa a.d. 1800 there was no prejudice, in this Anglo- 
Indian society, against ‘natural children’, and these would be sent to 
England for their education if not too dark ‘to escape detection’. 7 The 
Indian mothers of these well-beloved children were sometimes married 
in lawful wedlock by the children’s English fathers. The English servants 
of the East India Company who went the fastest and the farthest in this 
direction were the collectors—a new class of civil servants, stationed not 
in Calcutta but throughout the country-side, which had been called into 
existence in a.d. 1772 8 as a consequence of the Company’s acquisition, 
in a.d. 1765, of the financial administration of Bengal, Bihar, Orissa, and 
the Northern Circars. 9 These widely scattered English representatives 
of the Company came under the social influence of the Bengali nawabs 
and zamindSrs among whom they were living, and they transmitted this 
current of Indian cultural radiation to other English people in India. 10 
The English in India took to learning Persian;" and, through this 
sympathetic medium of intercourse, they made Indian friends. They 
found Muslim princes more congenial than MarSthSs; 12 but, besides the 
Muslim country gentry, their friends included cultivated Indian official 
colleagues of theirs, some of whom were Hindus, 13 and Hastings’ 14 own 
personal circle of Indian friends was knit by such genuine ties of feeling 
that, twenty years after he had left India, the survivors continued to 
make affectionate inquiries after him. 15 

This easy and intimate cosmopolitan eighteenth-century Anglo- 

' See Spear, op. cit., p. >33. * See ibid., pp. 83-85. 

1 Ibid., p. 133- 4 Sec ibid., p. 85. » See ibid.,pp. 32 and 37. 

6 Sec ibid., pp. 36-37. 7 Ibid., p. 63. * See ibid., p. 31. 

« See VI. vii. 365. 10 See Spear, op. cit., pp. 3 >~ 3 *- 

«« See ibid., p. 136. »» Sec ibid., p. 135. «» See ibid., p. 136. 

'• Governor of Bengal, A.D. 177a; Governor-General of Britilh India, A.D. 1774-85. 
15 Sec ibid., pp. 135-6. 


2io ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
Indian life startled a twentieth-century English student of History by its 
manifest freedom from subsequently erected barriers to social inter¬ 
course between English people and Indians when scenes from it were 
brought before his eye in contemporary pictures by John Zoffany 
(vivebat a.d. 1735-1810) and other English artists of the day. 1 This 
historical spectacle was startling because the genial ‘cosmopolitanism’ 
to which it bore witness had been swiftly superseded and permanently 
replaced by a bleaker social climate. This counter-movement, which 
first declared itself in symptoms that might have been discounted as 
trivial, eventually spread to the vital sphere of personal relations. The 
substitution of Western for Oriental military music in the Company’s 
forces at Madras in a.d. 1767 2 was followed, after Hastings’ recall in 
a.d. X785, by the banning of Oriental music in the social life of the 
English community in India. 1 Arrack went the same way; 4 and the habit 
of nargllah-smoking, which had replaced pipe-smoking circa a.d. 1754-5, 
declined after a.d. 1773.* By a.d. 1827 it had come to be regarded as 
extremely bad taste for an English lady in India to wear Indian orna¬ 
ments, 6 and, before the turn of the century, the contemporary Western 
styles of Hellenistic ‘classical’ architecture and gardening were already 
being applied in British India tels quels . 7 The exclusion of half-castes 
from the British Indian public service in a.d. 1792 s by Cornwallis 
(fungebatur a.d. 1786-93) was a graver portent which foreshadowed 
Wellesley’s deliberate creation of a social distance between English and 
Indians. "WcUesleyffungebatur a.d. 1798-1805) adopted a hectoring tone 
in his dealings with Indians, and he stopped the practice of inviting 
Indians and half-castes to official parties. 9 

‘Race prejudice at the beginning of the [eighteenth] century was instinc¬ 
tive, and disappeared with time and better acquaintance; at the end it was 
doctrinal, and precluded the acquaintance w’hich might have removed it.’ 10 


1 Sec, for example, Zoffany’* picture (in which Claude Martin figures) of Colonel 
Mordaunt’s cock match at Lucknow, a.d. 1786, painted for Warren Hastings, and his 
portrait group of the Palmer family, probably also painted at the same place in the same 
year. ‘Major William Palmer is looking at his wife, the Bibi FS’iz Bakhsh, who is seated 
on his right with her three children. The Bibi’s sister is on Palmer's left, and three 
women attendants complete the group’ (Catalogue of Exhibition of Art, chiefly from the 
Dominions of India and Pakistan (London 1947-8, Royal Academy of Arts)). These two 
pictures bear witness to the familiarity of the relations between the latc-cightecnth- 
ccntury English in India and their Indian contemporaries in private life: and this un¬ 
selfconscious practice of doing in India as India does was followed by them in affairs 
of state ns well. Zoffany’s picture of a durbar (Plate No. 4. in the Journal of the Royal 
Society of Arts, vol. xcviii, No. 4820, of the 5th May. 1950, illustrating Sir W. Foster’s 

B per on 'British Artists in India’ on pp. 518-25 of the same issue) portrays Warren 
istincs and his English staff seated cross-legged on the ground, transacting business 
with a Mughal potentate bolstered on a carpet. While the other Englishmen betray some 
signs of physical discomfort, Hastings is manifestly at his ease. 

* Sec Spear, op. cit., p. 30. J See ibid., p. 33. * See ibid., p. 34. 

J See ibid., pp. 36 and 98. On the other hand the cult of cleanliness, which the 
eighteenth-century Englishman in India had acquired from his Indian contemporaries, 
was transmitted by him to his twentieth-century compatriots in Great Britain (see ibid., 

6 t>ee ibid., p. 142* 1 Sec ibid., pp. 34 and 5 ©-sr. 

8 See ibid., p. 63. « See ibid., p. 138. 

»o Spear, op. cit., p. 144. The spirit of the pre-Wellesley phase of Anglo-Indian rela¬ 
tions died hardest at Bombay, where the commercial interests and activities of the 
English community continued to overshadow the field of government and administration 
(see ibid., pp. 134-5)- At Bombay (and likewise at Surat) the course of events was evolu- 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE HINDUS 211 

Why was it that the former free-and-easy personal relations died away 
so unluckily in an age when the loss of their beneficent influence on 
Anglo-Indian relations could least well be afforded? No doubt the 
change was due to the combined operation of a number of different 
causes. 

In the first place the latter-day English official in the Indian Civil 
Service might fairly plead that his unfortunate aloofness from the 
Indians whom he governed was the inevitable price of his precious moral 
integrity in the discharge of a public trusteeship. How could a man be 
expected to act professionally like a god without also retaining the airs of 
a god in private life ? Another, and less estimable, cause of the change of 
attitude was perhaps the pride inspired by conquest; for by a.d. 1849, 
and indeed by a.d. 1803, the military and political power of the 
English in India had become sensationally stronger than it had been in 
a.d. 1786, not to speak of a.d. 1757.' The operation of these two causes 
had been analysed acutely by a twentieth-century English student of 
the history of Indo-British social and cultural relations. 

‘As the [eighteenth] century drew to its close, a change in the social 
atmosphere gradually came about. The frequency of... “reciprocal enter¬ 
tainments” decreased, the formation of intimate friendships with Indians 
ceased-The higher posts of the Government were filled with appoint¬ 

ments from England; its designs became more imperial and its attitude 
more haughty and aloof. The gulf which Mussulman nawabs and English 
tons viveurs, diplomatic pandits and English scholars had for a time 
bridged over began ominously to widen again. ... A “superiority com¬ 
plex” was forming which regarded India not only as a country whose 
institutions were bad and* people corrupted, but one which was by its 
nature incapable of ever becoming any better . . . 

‘It is one of the ironies of Indo-European relations in India that the 
purging of the administration coincided with the widening of the racial 
gulf 2 . . . . The days of corrupt Company officials, of illgotten fortunes, of 
oppression of ryots, of zenanas and of illicit sexual connexions, were also 
the days when Englishmen were interested in Indian culture, wrote 
Persian verses, and foregathered with pandits and maulvis and nawabs 

tionary, not revolutionary (*« ibid., p. 75). English and Indian business men went on 
meeting on equal term*, and, between the English and the Parsecs, social relations were 
intimate (sec ibid., pp. 72,74-75, and 127). No doubt Bombay benefited from the stimu¬ 
lus of being India’s maritime march in an Oceanic age of history (see II. ii. 133). AH the 
same, on the 25th September, 1929, the writer of this Study wag reproved at Bombay by 
his English hosts there for having made the faux pas of taking an omnibus. It was ex¬ 
plained to him that, in Bombay, it was beneath an Englishman’s dignity to ride in a 
public conveyance. He ought to have ridden solitary in a cab. 

« Spear points out (in op. cit., pn. 32-33 and «J°) 'bat ‘the period of cosmopolitan 
intercourse’ between English and Indians in India, which can be couated approxi¬ 
mately with the term of Warren Hastings' governor-generalship (fungebatur A.D. 1774- 

S was also the period in which there was a balance of political power between the 
ish East India Company and the Indian successor-states of the Mughal RSj. Welles¬ 
ley ( fungtbatur a.d. 1798-1805), during whose governor-generalship first Tippu Sahib 
and then the Marathis were overthrown, and who introduced a viceregal splendour 
into the governor-general’s mise-rn-scine (see Spear, op. cit., p. 65), was alto the moving 
spirit in the deliberate adoption of a pointed attitude of haughty aloofness towards the 
English conquerors’ Indian subjects on the part of an alien English dominant minority. 

* The earliest recorded complaints of British race-feeling in India come from James 
Skinner (vivebar a.d. 1778-1841), a military adventurer with Indian blood in his veins 
who went over from the Marathi to the British service on the eve of the British assault 
on the Mara this in A.D. 1803 (Spear, op. cit., p. 13). 



2i2 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

on terms of social equality and personal friendship. The tragedy of 
Cornwallis ... was that in uprooting the acknowledged evils of corruption 
he upset the social balance without which mutual understanding was 
impossible. . . . Cornwallis . . . made a new governing class by his ex¬ 
clusion of all Indians from the higher governmental posts. Corruption 
was stamped out at the cost of equality and cooperation. In his own mind, 
as in the commonly accepted view, there was a necessary connexion be¬ 
tween the two measures; "Every native of Hindustan”, he said, “I verily 
believe, is corrupt”. . . . He thought English corruption could be solved 
by reasonable salaries, and did not stop to consider that the advantage of 
Indian goodwill made it at least worth trying as a remedy for Indian 
corruption also. He never thought of creating an Indian imperial bureau¬ 
cracy on the model of Akbar’s mansabdars, which by special training, 
proper salaries and the encouragement of equal treatment, promotion and 
honours, might have been bound to the Company as the Moghul officials 
were bound to the Emperor.’ 1 * 

A third cause of estrangement was the speeding-up of communica¬ 
tions between India and England as a consequence of certain early 
nineteenth-century achievements of Modern Western technology. The 
reopening and the subsequent improvement of the short route between 
Western Europe and India via Egypt—first by portage on camel-back 
between Alexandria and Suez from sailing-ship to sailing-ship, then by 
steam instead of sail and by railway instead of camel caravan, and 
finally by the opening of the Suez Canal in a.d. 1869*—made it feasible 
for English people to travel to and fro between England and India so 
quickly and frequently that an English civil servant or business man 
posted in India could now bring out an English wife to join him, 3 and 
could go on to bring up his children in England without completely 
breaking up his family life, especially after the linking up of India with 
England by telegraph in a.d. 1865. Thanks to the doubtful blessing of 
these technological miracles, the latter-day English employee in India 
contrived to do his work there as a pilgrim and a sojourner who remained 
psychologically domiciled in a home on English ground. 4 

The three so far enumerated causes of latter-day English aloofness 
from the Indians among whom the English in India worked were all of 
the Englishman’s making; but there was perhaps a fourth cause, and one 
more potent than the rest, of which the Englishman in India was the 
victim and not the originator. An Indian who had experienced and 

1 Spear, T. G. P.: The Nabobs: A Study of the Soeial Life of the English in Eighteenth- 
Century India (London 1932, Milford), pp. 136, 137, 145, and 137. 

* See Hoskins, H. L.: British Routes to India (London 1928, Longmans Green), 
P- 383- 

3 According to Spear, op. cit., pp. 140-2, the social self-insulation of the English 
in India was promoted by the increase in the number of English women in India—and 
also by the increase in the number of evangelical Protestant English missionaries, 
whose attitude towards 'the heathen’ was bigoted. 

♦ While the technological revolution in means of communication was the new factor 
that made this attitude of aloofness come to prevail among Englishmen serving in India 
in all capacities, the psychological change had been initiated, while the sailing ship was 
still in its heyday, by the soldiers of the Royal British Army as soon as units of this force 
had begun to be posted in India. The Royal troops 'inaugurated the conception of 
service in India as a temporary vocation undertaken with a view to retirement in Eng¬ 
land' (Spear, op. cit., p. 31), whereas the officers of the newly raised Company troops 
‘in civil life conformed to their Anglo-Indian environments’ (ibid., p. 30). 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE HINDUS 213 
resented the latter-day English resident’s aloofness might feel more 
charitably towards this originally self-invited (and eventually also self- 
dismissed) intruder if he were to recollect that, for perhaps as long as 
three thousand years before the advent of the English in India, the 
sub-continent had been saddled with the institution of Caste; that the 
Hindu Society had accentuated a trait which it had inherited from its 
Indie predecessor; and that after the departure of the English, as before 
their arrival, the people of India were still afflicting themselves with a 
social evil of their own making. Looked at in the long perspective of 
Indian history, the aloofness which the English in India developed 
during the hundred and fifty years of their raj could be diagnosed as 
being a mild attack of the chronic Indian psychological malady of castc- 
mindedness. It was perhaps not altogether surprising or altogether in¬ 
excusable that, in the course of their sojourn in India, the English 
should have been affected in their turn by an age-old sub-continental 
atmosphere. 1 

The Unsolved Problem of a Rising Pressure of Population 

While the aggravating effect of a latter-day English aloofness on the 
spiritual discord in intellectually Westernized Hindu souls might be 

« This fourth possible explanation of the aloofness to which the English in India 
gradually succumbed might account for the striking difference, in their attitude towards 
'natives’i between the latter-day English in India and their Dutch contemporaries in 
Indonesia. In Insular India the personal relations between the Dutch and the Javanese 
were still, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, much what the relations between 
the English and the Hindus in Continental India had been in the eighteenth century. 
Down to the moment of the liquidation of the Dutch Empire in Indonesia by the 
Japanese conquest in a.d. 1942, the Dutch were still bringing up in Java children of 
undiluted Dutch blood, and at the same time intermarrying with the Javanese and 
reckoning the issue of mixed marriages as Europeans. Why, in Java, did no refrigeration 
of the psychological atmosphere occur, considering that the first three of the four 
possible causes of the change in British India were all operative in Netherlands India 
likewise? Might not the answer be that in Indonesia the fourth of the causes that we 
have enumerated was not at work, and that this difference in the situation made all the 
difference to the course of events? A difference in the cultural environment had not 
always existed, for, from the fifth to the fifteenth century of the Christian Era, Indonesia 
had been an overseas colonial extension of the Hindu World; but, between the decline 
and fall of the Hindu Indonesian Empire of Majnpahit during the hundred years ending 
in a.d. 1318 and the arrival of the Dutch in a.d. 159s, Indonesia was captured from the 
Hindu Society by the Arabic Muslim Society, and In a.d. 1952 the only living monu¬ 
ment of the Hindu Age in the Archipelago was the persisting Hinduism of the inhabi¬ 
tants of the little island of Bali. Thus, since before the beginning of the Dutch Rai in 
Indonesia, the prevailing religion in the Archipelago had come to be Islam; and, of all 
the living higher religions, Islam—standing, as it did, for equality between all loyal 
Muslim subjects of a single sovereign Lord God—was the most inimical, in practice as 
well as in theory, to the institution of Caste. Perhaps, therefore, it was no accident that 
in an Indonesia where Islam held the field the Dutch should have remained immune 
from the caste spirit in an age when the English were succumbing to it in a Continental 
India where Islam had never succeeded in gaining the allegiance of a majority of the 
population and had recently also suffered a political eclipse. 

In another context (in II. i. 211-27), wc have observed that, in the matter of race feel¬ 
ing, Roman Catholic Western Christians had, on the whole, come nearer than Protestant 
Western Christians to approaching the Islamic standard, though in most other respects 
Protestantism had more affinity with Islam than Roman Catholicism had. An un¬ 
fortunate inspiration from the Old Testament appears to account for the badness of the 
record of the Dutch settlers in South Africa and the English settlers in North America, 
by comparison with the French Canadians, in their behaviour towards the 'Canaanites' 
whom they found in the land. A common Protestantism, however, cannot explain either 
the diversity of Dutch Protestant behaviour in South Africa and in Indonesia or the 
diversity of English Protestant behaviour in India in the eighteenth and in the twentieth 
century. 





2 X 4 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
relieved by the termination of the British Raj, the ameliorative effect of 
British administration on the condition and expectations of the Indian 
peasantry was a British legacy which might prove to be a mill-stone 
round the necks of the British civil servants’ Hindu successors in the 
government of India. 

Under a Pax Britannica that had been maintained for more than a 
hundred years, the natural resources of the sub-continent had been eked 
out in divers ways: by the building of a net-work of railways which made 
it possible for surplus food-supplies in one area to be transported to 
another area where there was a shortage; by the irrigation of previously 
uncultivated areas in the Panjab; and, above all, by an able and con¬ 
scientious administration. By the time of the departure of their English 
rulers in a.d. 1947, the Indian peasantry, uneducated though they still 
were in the academic sense, had perhaps become just sufficiently alive to 
the material achievements of a scientifically developed Modern Western 
technology and the political ideals of a Christian-hearted Modern 
Western democracy 1 to begin to question both the justice and the in¬ 
evitability of their own ancestral indigence. They had begun to feel 
dimly that they too had a right to share in those amenities of Civiliza¬ 
tion which in the past had been the monopoly of a small minority in 
India as elsewhere, and at the same time to imagine vaguely that the 
magic cornucopia of Science could perform, ‘in real life’, the legendary 
miracle of the loaves and fishes, if only a ruling minority chose to use it 
for this beneficent purpose. 

At the same time an Indian peasantry that was beginning to dream 
these dreams had been doing its worst to prevent their realization by 
continuing, as in the past, to breed heedlessly up to the limits of sub¬ 
sistence on a meagre customary standard of living, with the result that 
the addition to India’s food supply which had been wrung out of a 
previously unutilized margin of resources by British administrative 
enterprise had mainly gone, not towards improving the Indian peasant’s 
individual lot, but towards increasing the peasantry’s numbers. Under 
British rule the population of India had risen from about 206,000,000 
in a.d. 1872 to 338,119,154 in a.d. 1931 and 388,997,955 in a.d. 1941; 
at the time of the transfer of power from English to Indian hands, this 
human flood was still rising; and by the same date the possibilities of 
increasing India’s capacity to contain a mounting volume of inhabitants 
had been to a large extent used up. How were the Hindu successors of the 
British to handle a political legacy which already allowed no margin at 
all for incompetence or folly in the administration of the stewardship 
which they had now taken over ? 

The traditional cure for ‘over-population’, not only in the Hindu 
World but in the economy of other civilizations too in a pre-democratic 
age, was to allow famine, pestilence, civil disorder, and war to reduce the 
population again to a figure at which the survivors would once more find 
themselves able to lead their traditional life on their customary low 
standard; and horrifying instances of drastic reductions of population 

1 Sec Bergson, H.: La Deux Sources de la Morale el de La Religion (Paris 1932, 
Alcan), pp. 304-5, quoted in this Study in I. i. 9 and IV. iv. 156. 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE HINDUS 2x5 

by methods of barbarism were indeed on record. For example, the 
population of ‘Iraq, after having been built up by perhaps more than 
three thousand years of careful husbandry, had been cut down again by 
the last two Romano-Persian wars and thereafter by the Mongol in¬ 
vasion; 1 North-West Africa, whose scientific cultivation the Carthagin¬ 
ians had begun, the Romans had completed, and the Primitive Muslim 
Arabs had spared, had eventually been devastated by the barbarian Arab 
Banu Hilal and Banu Sulaym; 1 and the population of China had been 
reduced, if the official census figures were to be believed, from 9,069,154 
to 2,900,000 families within the short term of ten years ( a . d . 754-64) by 
the destructive effects of An Lu Shan’s rebellion against the T'ang 
regime. 3 In the latest chapter of Indian history before the transfer of 
power, Mahatma Gandhi, in his single-minded quest of independence 
for an India struggling to be free, had willed for her the same Malthusian 
end, without willing the necessary barbaric means. 

Gandhi had divined that the achievement of mere political liberation 
from British rule might be an illusory emancipation if India still re¬ 
mained entangled in the economic tendrils of a Westernized World; and 
he unerringly laid his axe to this economic banyan tree’s technological 
root in launching his campaign for the abandonment of the use of 
machine-made cotton goods by the people of India in favour of home- 
spun; but his countrymen’s unwillingness to follow his lead on this 
crucial point was a sign of the times, 4 for it brought into prominence the 
fact that by this date India was implicated economically in the life of 
the Western World no longer merely as a purchaser from abroad of the 
products of a Western mechanized industry, but now also by the far 
more compromising bond of having learnt to manufacture such products 
for herself with Indian hands that had mastered a Western technique. 
Moreover, even if Gandhi had succeeded in putting out of business the 
Hindu textile manufacturers of Ahmadabad and Bombay, the effect 
would have been to precipitate in India an economic, social, and political 
crisis which could never have been left for Nature to solve in her own 
brutal way by cither a British civil service or by its Western-educated 
Hindu successors. 

If and when this still undischarged but also still unexorcized storm- 
cloud on a politically free India’s horizon did burst in a tornado-blast, 
the Hindu statesmen responsible for the government of India in that 
day would be constrained by the moral atmosphere of a Westernizing 
World to strive for some relatively humane and constructive solution. 
They would find themselves confronted with an Indian peasantry that 
had caught just enough of the Modern Western spirit to be unwilling 
this time to acquiesce tamely in a peasantry’s traditional tribulations; 
they would have to reckon with an oecumenical public conscience 5 

X Sec IV. iv. 42 - 43 - * Sec III. iii. 322-4, 445 - 6 , and 473 ~ 4 . “*»d V. v. 247. 

* See Fitzgerald, C. P.: China, A Short Cultural History (London 1935, Cresset 
Press), p. 308. 4 Sec III. iii. 190-1. and 202-4. 

s This conscience had proclaimed a conviction of responsibility for being the keeper 
of the vast peasant majority of Mankind when, at the dose of the general war of a.d. 
1939-45, the authorities of the victorious United Nations had taken account of the whole 
population of the World, including the rice-eating as well as the wheat-eating peoples, 
in administering the distribution of the then available food supplies. 



216 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
which no parochial government could any longer afford to ignore; and, 
most compelling influence of all, the voice of this conscience would also 
be speaking to them from within their own partially Westernized souls. 

For these reasons it could be prophesied with some confidence that 
the Western-minded statesmen of a Hindu Raj would have to grapple 
one day with the problem of a depressed Indian peasantry. It could not, 
however, be taken for granted that they would find themselves able to 
solve this inexorable problem by Modern Western political methods; 
and, should a Western panacea prove to be of no avail in a crisis which, 
for India, would be one of life and death, a rival Russian panacea would 
inevitably force its way on to India’s national agenda; for a Communist 
Russia, like a Westernizing India, had inherited the problem of a de¬ 
pressed peasantry from her native cultural past, and, unlike India, she 
had already responded to this challenge on lines that she had worked out 
for herself. These Communist lines might be too ruthless and too revolu¬ 
tionary for either the Indian peasantry or the Indian intelligentsia to be 
able to follow them with any zest; but, as an alternative to the still 
grimmer fate of decimation, a Communist solution of the peasantry 
problem might demand consideration, faute de mieux, and this might 
bring a politically emancipated India face to face with the ideology of a 
Soviet Union with whom India—unlike China and the Islamic World 
and Eastern Europe—was not, or at any rate not yet, in immediate 
geographical contact. 1 

4. The Modern West and the Islamic World 
The Encirclement of the Islamic World by the West, Russia, and Tibet 

At the opening of the modern chapter of Western history, two sister 
Islamic societies, standing back to back, blocked all the overland lines of 
access from the contemporary domains of the Western and the Russian 
Society to other parts of the Old World. 

Though the Arabic Muslim Civilization had not inherited the 
Atlantic seaboard of the Andalusian Umayyad Caliphate in the Iberian 
Peninsula, at the close of the fifteenth century it was still holding an 
Atlantic seaboard in Africa extending from the Straits of Gibraltar to 
the Senegal. Western Christendom thus still remained insulated from 
Tropical Africa overland, while waves of Arab influence were breaking 
upon the Dark Continent not only along its north coast in the Sudan out 
of the dry sea of the Sahara, but also along its east coast, the S 5 hil, out 
of the Indian Ocean. 1 That ocean had indeed become an Arab lake, to 


1 The bearing of Russia’s Communist solution of the problem of a depressed peasan- 
y on the destinies of alt the non-Russian societies, including India, that were likewise 


The possibility that the Soviet Union and India might eventually b’ccomc immediate 
neighbours as a consequence of the partition of British India between the Indian Union 
ana Pakistan is discussed on pp. 690-1, below. 

1 One wave of Arab influence also broke—to the eventual undoing of the Arabs 
themselves—upon another then still-dark continent lying not to the south but to the 
north of the Arabic Muslim World. The lateen sail (sec Perry, J. H.: Europe and a 
Wider World (London 1949, Hutchinson), pp. 22-24) and the art of navigating the high 
seas by taking astronomical bearings (see Prestage, E.: The Portuguese Pioneers (London 
1938, Black), p. 315) were both conveyed by Arab hands from the Indian Ocean, where 


THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 217 
which the Venetian trading partners of the Egyptian middlemen had no 
access, while Arab shipping was not only plying up and down the Indian 
Ocean’s African shore from Suez to Sofala, but had also found its way 
across to Indonesia, captured the archipelago from Hinduism for Islam, 
and pushed on eastwards to plant an outpost in the Western Pacific by 
converting the pagan Malay inhabitants of the southernmost of the 
Philippines—whom the Spanish ocean-going mariners duly recognized 
as ‘Moors' when they came upon them in the sixteenth century in a cir¬ 
cumnavigation of the globe from east to west. 

At the close of the fifteenth century the Iranic Muslim Civilization 
held what seemed to be an even stronger strategic position vis-a-vis both 
Western Christendom and Russia. The ‘Osmanli empire-builders’ pro¬ 
gramme of bringing the whole of the main body of Orthodox Christen¬ 
dom under Iranic Muslim rule had been duly completed by Sultan 
Mehmed II Fatih (imperabat a . d . 1451-81) through the conquest of 
Constantinople, the Morea, Q 3 ram 3 n, and Trcbizond. The same reign 
had seen the Black Sea turned into an Ottoman Lake in a . d . 1475 
through the seizure of the Genoese colonies Caffa and Tana in the 
Crimea 1 and the establishment of Ottoman suzerainty over a Crimean 
Tatar successor-state of Chingis Khan’s son Juji’s Mongol horde, 
whose sedentary subjects in the peninsula and nomad subjects in the 
Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe were the ‘Osmanlis’ fellow 
Muslims and fellow Turks. Adjoining the Khanate of the Crimea on the 
east, the sister Khanate of AstrakhSn commanded the mouth of the 
Volga, while the Khanate of Q 3 zan, whose likewise Turkish-speaking 
Muslim inhabitants had once been known as ‘the White Bulgars’, com¬ 
manded the confluence of the Volga with the Kama and thereby 
blocked the way from Muscovy both down the Volga and across the 
southern Urals. Behind this front extending from the Qazanlys' western 
frontier on the Volga to the ‘Osmanlis’ western frontier on the Adriatic, 
the Iranic Muslim World extended south-eastwards over Bashkiristan 
and Qazaqistan and the Tarim Basin to the north-western Chinese 
provinces of Kansu and Shensi, and over Iran and Hindustan to Bengal 
and the Deccan. 

This massive Islamic road-block was a challenge which evoked a 
proportionately energetic response from pioneer communities in the 
two blockaded Christian societies. 

In Western Christendom the peoples of the Atlantic seaboard in¬ 
vented in the fifteenth century a new type of ocean-going sailing-ship, 
three-masted and square-rigged, with a sprinkling first of lateen and 
later of fore-and-aft sails, which was capable of keeping the sea for 
months on end without putting into port and which earned, by its 
unprecedented performance, the distinction of being known as ‘the 
ship’ par excellence for the next three and a half centuries. 2 In such 

they had been invented, to the maritime peoples on the Mediterranean and Atlantic 
seaboards of Western Chriatendom. 1 Sec II. »• 445 - 

a This sudden swift advance in the arts of ship-building and navigation in Western 
Christendom in the fifteenth century, and the period of relative stagnation that followed 
until the nineteenth century brought another sudden swift advance, are reviewed in 
XI. ix. 364-74. 



218 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
vessels, Portuguese mariners, who had made their trial runs in deep-sea 
navigation by discovering Madeira circa a.d. 1420 and the Azores in a.d. 
1432, succeeded in outflanking the Arab seafront on the Atlantic by 
rounding Cape Verde in a.d. X445, reaching the Equator in a.d. 1471, 
rounding the Cape of Good Hope in a.d. 1487-8, landing at Calicut, on 
the west coast of India, in a.d. 1498, seizing command of the Straits of 
Malacca in a.d. 1511, and pushing on into the Western Pacific to show 
their flag at Canton in a.d. 1516 and on the coast of Japan in a.d. 1542-3.' 
In a flash the Portuguese had snatched out of Arab hands the thalasso- 
cracy of the Indian Ocean; and, though the Portuguese afterwards lost 
all but a remnant of their naval and commercial empire in the East to 
Dutch, English, and French Western rivals of theirs, the Arabs were 
never able to win their lost thalassocracy back. 2 The blockade of Western 
Christendom by an Arabic World that had outflanked it overland in 
Africa had not only been broken; it had been inverted into a maritime 
blockade of the Arabic World by Western Christendom through the 
Westerners’ newly acquired command of a ubiquitous Ocean. 1 

While these eastward-faring Portuguese pioneers in a sudden over¬ 
seas expansion of the Western World were thus outflanking an Arabic 
Muslim World on the south, eastward-faring Cossack river-boatmen 
were as suddenly and sweepingly extending the borders of the Russian 
World by outflanking an Iranic Muslim World on the north. The way 
was opened for them by the Muscovite Tsar Ivan IV when he conquered 
Qazan in a.d. 1552; for Qazan had been the Iranic World’s north¬ 
eastern bastion, and after its fall there was no obstacle except forest and 
frost, which were the Nomad-fighting Cossacks’ familiar allies, to 
prevent these pioneers of a Russian Orthodox Christendom from passing 
the Urals and rapidly working their way eastwards along the Siberian 
waterways until they were brought to a halt by stumbling in a.d. 1638 4 
on the Pacific Ocean and then, on the 24th March, 1652, on the north¬ 
eastern marches of the Manchu Empirc. s In reaching these new frontiers 
an expanding Russian World had outflanked not only the Iranic Muslim 
World but the whole of the Eurasian Steppe 6 —a waterless inland sea 
which Timur Lenk had neglected to turn into an Iranic ‘lake’ when the 
opportunity for extending his empire round all its coasts had presented 
itself to him in the fourteenth century. 7 The Iranic World now had to 
pay the penalty for Timur’s lack of vision. Before Timur’s day a nascent 
Iranic Muslim Civilization had succeeded in capturing the Turkish¬ 
speaking western half of a latter-day Eurasian Nomad World through 

* Sec p. 313, n. 2, below. 

* The one successful counter-stroke which the Arabs did achieve against the Portu¬ 
guese in their decline was their ejection of this first wave of Western intruders not only 
from Maskat [circa a.d. 1648) and from the rest of ‘Uman, but also from the cast coast 
of Africa, as far south as Zanzibar inclusive, in the course of the seventeenth and eigh¬ 
teenth centuries of the Christian Era; but this was only an ephemeral Arab recovery in 
the interval between two waves of Western expansion. In the nineteenth century the 
Westerners easily defeated the Arabs in the competition between them for the opening 
up of the interior of the African continent. 

a See VII. vii, $35 and XII. ix. 460-70- 4 Sec II. ii. 157 and V. v. 206-7. 

s See Ravenstein, E. G.: The Russians on the Amur (London 1861, TrQbner), p. 21. 

6 The Cossacks’ emulation of the exploits of the Portuguese has been noticed in III. 
iii. 19; IV. iv. 497 - 8 ; and V. v. 315-16. 7 See IV. iv. 491-501. 



THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 219 

the conversion of the three western appanages of the Mongol Empire to 
the Sunni form of Islam ;* and, on the eve of the Russian conquest of 
Western Siberia, this victory of the Iranic Civilization in this quarter had 
been rounded off by the conversion of the Khanate of Sibir; but the 
Iranic Civilization never went on to capture the Mongol-speaking 
eastern half of Eurasia on the farther side of the Zungarian Gap; and in 
a.d. 1576-7 the Mongols—followed by the Calmucks circa a.d. 1620— 
abandoned a primitive paganism, not, like their western cousins, for 
Islam, but for the Tantric Mahayanian form of Buddhism which had 
been preserved in a Tibetan fastness by a fossil of an extinct Indie 
Civilization. 1 

Thus, in the course of little more than a century reckoning from the 
date of the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror’s death in a.d. 
1481, an Islamic World into which the Iranic and Arabic societies had 
coalesced since the conquest of Syria and Egypt by Sultan Selim I in 
a.d. 1516-17 3 had been not only outflanked on two sides but completely 
encircled by the pioneering enterprise of Portuguese sailors, Cossack 
backwoodsmen, and Lama missionaries. By the turn of the sixteenth 
and seventeenth centuries the noose was round the victim’s neck; and, 
what was more, he had by then already been foiled in divers attempts to 
break out of the toils. This failure was a signal one in view of his posses¬ 
sion of the interior lines (the one advantage that had not only been left 
to him, but had been weighted still more heavily in his favour by his 
opponents’ far-flung encircling operations); and he was now inexorably 
condemned to die by strangulation whenever an alien executioner might 
choose to draw the fatal bow-string tight. Yet the suddenness with which 
the Islamic World had been caught in this potential stranglehold was 
not so extraordinary as the length of the time that was still to elapse 
before either the Muslims’ adversaries or the Muslims themselves were 
to become sufficiently alive to the situation to be moved to take action— 
on the Western and the Russian side, action to pounce upon an appar¬ 
ently helpless prey, and, on the Muslim side, action to escape from 
apparently desperate straits. 

The Postponement of the Crisis 

The Islamic World’s Western and Russian adversaries were slow to 
close in upon their quarry, even when they seemed to have it at their 
mercy; and, when they did venture, their timidity and procrastination 
were justified in the event by a succession of discouraging military 
experiences. In the Ottoman recoil from the disastrous outcome of the 
second Ottoman siege of Vienna in a.d. 1682-3, which marked the 
visible turn of the tide in the warfare between the Islamic World and 
the West on a Danubian front, the Hapsburg counter-offensive was 
repelled in a.d. 1689 and again in a.d. 1738-9—this second time, 
definitively. When the Venetians took the opportunity of the Ottoman 

x These were jQji’s portion on the steppe between the Altai and the Carpathians; 
Chaghauy’s portion astride the Zungarian Gap; and Huligu’s portion in Iran and 
'Iraq. 

* See III. iii. 4*1; IV. iv. 497; V. v. 137 and 309-10. 

3 See I. i. 387-8, and xi, maps 50 and ji. 



220 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
Power’s momentary collapse to conquer the Morea in and after a.d. 
1684, they were made to pay for their temerity by losing in a.d. 1715 
not only this ephemeral acquisition but their ancient possession the 
Island of Tinos into the bargain. Peter the Great took the same opportu¬ 
nity to capture the fortress-port of Azov in a.d. 1696; but, when he was 
emboldened by this success to invade Moldavia in a.d. 1711, at a moment 
when he had relieved himself of pressure from Sweden by his sensational 
victor)- over Charles XII at Poltava in a.d. 1709, he had to surrender the 
precious maritime outlet that he had won for Russia in an inner recess 
of an inland sea that was still a Turkish lake, as the price of being allowed 
to escape annihilation in Moldavia at the hands of an Ottoman army 
that had caught the rash invader in its grip. The first Muslim populations 
of any appreciable size to pass under Western rule were those in Java, 
which the Dutch acquired in a.d. 1600-84, 1 ant * Bengal, which the 
British acquired in a.d. 1757-60; but these were two outlying enclaves 
on the Islamic World’s extreme south-eastern edge; and, when the 
British, after having conquered all the rest of India east of the Indus 
Valley, proceeded in a.d. 1838 to trench on the core of Dar-al-Islam by 
invading Afghanistan, they suffered a disaster there which took the 
Western aggressors aback and changed the course of history. 

In a.d. 1952 the greater part of this core, from Afghanistan to Egypt 
and from Turkey to the Yaman, was free from alien political rule or even 
control. By that date Egypt, Jordan, the Lebanon, Syria, and ’Iraq had 
all rc-cmcrgcd from beneath the flood of British and French imperialism 
which had submerged them successively in a.d. 1882 and in the course 
of the General War of a.d. 1914-18, and the residual threat to the inte¬ 
grity and independence of the heart of the Arabic World was now com¬ 
ing, not from the Western Powers, but from the Zionists. The homeland 
of the Ottoman Turks in Anatolia had likewise emerged intact from an 
attempt to carve a Greek empire out of it in a.d. 1919-22. In a.d. 1952 
the two principal exceptions to the freedom from alien rule which was 
being enjoyed for the most part by the core of Dar-al-Isl 5 m were the 
Far West of the Arabic Muslim World in North-West Africa, which had 
fallen into the hands of France, and the Far East of the Iranic Muslim 
World in the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin, which had fallen into the hands of 
Russia. Elsewhere, D 5 r-al-Islam had merely been shorn of outlying 
fringes in India, Indonesia, and Rumclia and of imperfectly reclaimed 
hinterlands—such as the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe and 
its adjuncts the Crimea and the Caucasus, which Russia had acquired 
since a.d. 1774, and the interior of Tropical Africa, which the West 
European Powers had partitioned among themselves since a.d. iSSo. 1 
The slowness of the Modern Western World’s advance at the Islamic 
World’s expense can be measured by its history in the Maghrib. 

In the past, this Mediterranean island, cut off, as it was, from both the 

1 By A.D. 1684 the Dutch had become masters of Western Java ar.d paramount in the 
rest of the island; but it was not till a.d. 1830 that the whole of Java was brought under 
effective Dutch rule. 

J A possible relation of cause and effect between the success of the Islamic World in 
preserving its independence in the nineteenth century of the Christian Era and the ill 
success of the contemporary Panislamic Movement is discussed on pp. 692-5, below. 



THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 22 i 
Nile Valley and the Western Sudan by the dry sea of the Sahara, had 
been apt to experience the same fortunes as the Iberian Peninsula and 
Sicily, with which it was in closer touch across the waters of the Western 
Mediterranean; and, when, at the dawn of a Modern Age of Western 
history, the union of Aragon with Castile in a.d. 1479 was followed by 
the Spanish conquest of Granada in a.d. 1492 and by the rounding off of 
the Aragonese insular empire in Sardinia and Sicily through the Spanish 
conquest of Naples in a.d. 1503, it might have been expected that the 
North-West African countries opening on to the Mediterranean would 
now fall to Spain, and the Atlantic coast of Morocco to Portugal. The 
Portuguese had, indeed, begun to carve out a transmarine Algarve on 
the Moroccan side of the Straits of Gibraltar in a.d. 1415-71, and the 
Spaniards followed suit by holding Tripoli from a.d. 1510 to a.d. 1551 
and imposing their suzerainty on the Hafsid princes of Tunisia from 
a.d. 1535 10 A - D - I 574 ! but these prizes were snatched by the ‘Osmanlis 
out of the Spaniards’ hands after the Ottoman corsair Uruj Barbarossa 
of Lesbos’ had audaciously driven a wedge between the Spaniards and 
the Portuguese by establishing himself in Algeria in a.d. 1516-18.* All 
that eventually remained of this abortive Spanish empire in the Maghrib 
was a tenuous chain of presidios clinging to peninsulas and islets along 
the rocky shore of the Moroccan Rif; and the incipient Portuguese 
empire along the Atlantic coast was excised by the Moroccans single- 
handed, without Ottoman aid. When King Sebastian of Portugal set out 
to complete the Portuguese conquest of Morocco in a.d. 1578, the royal 
invader and his army paid for their aggression with their lives, and 
Portugal with the loss of her independence for sixty years. 1 

Thereafter, until after the opening of the nineteenth century of the 
Christian Era, the Barbary Corsairs—unconquered by the Franks and 
unamenable to the Porte—preyed on the shipping of all Western 
Christian maritime Powers whose governments did not submit to paying 
them an annual tribute. It was not till a.d. 1803-5 that the Tripolitanians 
were chastised by the United States, and not till a.d. 28x6 that an inter¬ 
national squadron commanded by Lord Exmouth made it clear to the 
rulers of all the Barbary States that their piracy would no longer be 
tolerated by Western Christian Powers who now at last had their hands 
free from the Napoleonic Wars. The definitive Western Christian con¬ 
quest of the Far West of the Islamic World did not begin till the French 
landed at Algiers in a.d. 1830 to find there for France a substitute for 
the empire which she had not succeeded in imposing on Europe; and 
104 years were to elapse between this first French landing on the North- 
West African coast and the submission to France of the last unsubdued 
tribes in the Atlas in a.d. 1934. A spectator of the Spanish landing at 
Goletta in a.d. 1535 who had supposed himself to be witnessing the 
political annexation of the Maghrib to Western Christendom would have 
been just four hundred years out of his reckoning. 

' It is perhsps not fanciful to suggest that Barbarossa’a prowess at sea was an in¬ 
heritance from the age-old Greek inhabitants and medieval Italian masters of his native 
island. 

* See I. i. 348; p. 104 - 5 . above; X. ix. 37-38. 

1 Portugal was engulfed in the Spanish Monarchy from A.D. 1581 to A.D. 1640. 



222 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

Why had both the West and Russia been so slow in taking the offen¬ 
sive against an hereditary enemy at their gates ? And why, after they had 
at last tasted blood, had they not managed to devour more than the 
extremities of this Tityos’s carcase? In a list of reasons for the Islamic 
World’s rather surprising reprieve we may include the initial sclf-confi- 
dcncc with which the Muslims had been inspired by the memory of 
extraordinary previous achievements; the subsequent tactical victories 
that masked their strategical defeat in their attempts to break out of the 
toils of Western and Russian encirclement; the long-lasting effect of 
these impressive Muslim successes in inducing the Westerners to take the 
Muslims at their own valuation; the leading Modern Western peoples’ 
loss of interest in the Mediterranean for some three hundred years after 
their conquest of the Ocean towards the close of the fifteenth century; 
and the mutual frustration of the rival competitors for the spoils of the 
Islamic World after the Western Powers and Russia had at last become 
aware that the once formidable titan now lay at their mercy. 

The Muslims’ initial self-confidence was indeed well-founded; for 
both the sister Islamic societies had done mighty deeds in their infancy. 
In the thirteenth century of the Christian Era the Arabic Muslim 
Society had performed in real life the infant H6rakles’ legendary feat of 
strangling, each with a single hand, the two snakes sent by his pcrsccu- 
tress Hera to devour the babe in his cradle. This Herculean prowess 
had been displayed by the Arabic Muslim Society in saving itself from 
the peril of being overwhelmed by a hostile combination between two 
formidable Christian aggressors when in a.d. 1260 the Far Eastern 
Christians, with the united forces of a Eurasian Nomadism at their 
back, had pushed across the Euphrates into Syria as far as Damascus, 
while the Western Christian Crusaders were still holding a bridgehead 
on the Syrian coast no farther away than Acre. 1 This thirteenth-century 
Arabic Muslim prodigy of self-preservation was matched in the four¬ 
teenth and fifteenth centuries by the Iranic Muslim Society’s not less 
remarkable aggressive feat of conquering the main body of Orthodox 
Christendom. With these achievements to their credit, the Muslims 
took it for granted that they were invincible; and their consequent 
moral and prestige long continued to compensate for their increasing 
technological inferiority to their Modern Western and Westernizing 
adversaries. 

This prestige and moral were buoyed up by the Muslims’ subsequent 
tactical victories in their strategically unsuccessful attempts to break out 
of a ring that had been run round them by their Christian neighbours; 1 
for the superficial successes immediately made their mark, while the 
underlying failures long escaped notice. 

In the Mediterranean, for example, the ‘Osmanlis’ sixteenth-century 

1 See II. ii. 238 and 451. and p. 255, below. 

1 The history of the Islamic World's long-drawn-out struggle with the Western 
Powers and Russia from the sixteenth century onwards had much in common with the 
history of Germany’s struggle with the same adversaries in the first and second world 
wars; and indeed in the First World War Germany and Turkey were in the same camp. 
The Muslims, like the Germans, won battle after battle without being able to save them¬ 
selves by these victories from eventually losing the war. 


THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 223 
success in defeating Spain’s attempt to gain possession of the Maghrib,' 
and the Barbary Corsairs’ subsequent thalassocracy in the Mediterranean 
on sufferance from Western maritime Powers prc-occupicd with Oceanic 
enterprises, obscured the ‘Osmanlis’ far more significant failure to break 
through to the coast of the Atlantic and compete with the Western 
Christian Powers for possession of the Americas. 1 The ‘Osmanlis’ 
capture of Rhodes from the Knights of Saint John in a.d. 1522 was 
likewise more sensational, though less significant, than their subsequent 
inability to expel the Knights from their new naval base on the Island of 
Malta. 

The ‘Osmanlis did break through to the Indian Ocean after their 
conquest of Egypt in a.d. 1517; and their subsequent defeats by the 
Portuguese off Diu in a.d. 1538 3 and in Abyssinia in a.d. 1542-3 4 were 
more momentous than either their victory in the same year a.d. 1538 
off Preveza or their reverse in a.d. 1571 at Lepanto in an unprofitable 
struggle with the Mediterranean Western maritime Powers for the 
command of a land-locked sea whose narrow outlet into the Atlantic was 
out of the ‘Osmanlis’ reach. If, instead of having to submit to being 
bottled up in the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf as tightly as in the 
Mediterranean, Ottoman sea-power had been able to retrieve the recent 
failure of Egyptian sea-power to sweep the Indian Ocean clear of the 
Portuguese intruders, the ‘Osmanlis might have become the heirs of the 
Indian Muslim princes of Gujerat and have anticipated the descendants 
of their ancient enemy Timur Lcnk in becoming the Turkish Muslim 
founders of an Indian universal state. This historic Ottoman failure in 
the Indian Ocean attracted less attention, however, than either the sub¬ 
sequent feats of other Muslim Powers on the Indian mainland 5 or the 
‘Osmanlis’ own antecedent feat of swallowing up an Egyptian Mamluk 
Empire which had been the leading Power in the Arabic World for a 
quarter of a millennium. 

This amalgamation of the Mamluk with the Ottoman Empire was 
indeed a conspicuous alteration of the political map. Yet the ‘Osmanlis’ 
acquisition of the Egyptian portage between the Mediterranean and the 
Red Sea, which gave them the strategic advantage of holding the interior 
lines in a contest in the Indian Ocean with the Portuguese circumnavi¬ 
gators of Africa, proved barren after all when the ‘Osmanlis failed 
nevertheless to wrest the command of the Indian Ocean out of Portu¬ 
guese hands. Nor did the concentration of Islamic forces through the 
union of Egypt and other Arabic countries with the Ottoman Empire in 
the sixteenth century make up for the fatal disruption of the Iranic 
World, at the beginning of the same century, through the sudden rise of 
a militantly anti-Ottoman Safawl Shi'ite Power in the Iranic World’s 
heart. 6 In the ensuing struggle in the Indian Ocean between the 


See p. 22 x, above. 
See II. ii. 


1 bee II. u. 444-5- 

. 445. 4 See II. ii. 365-6 and 445. 

* In a.d. 1565 the Muslim conquest of the Indian sub-continent was completed by 
the Dcccancse Muslim Powers’ feat of overthrowing and partitioning the Hindu Empire 
of Vijayanagar (see V. v. 515, with n. 1). In a.d. 1572 the Muslim power in India was 
concentrated into an oecumenical r 5 j through the Timurid Mughal pnnee Akbar s 
conquest of Gujcrit in that year. 6 See I. i. 366-88. 


224 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
‘Osmanlis and the Portuguese, the Portuguese partly owed their victory 
to a schism in the Iranic Muslim camp which enabled the Portuguese 
to win the ‘Osmanlis’ Safawl enemies for their allies instead of finding 
themselves confronted with a united Iranic World. 

On the Danubian front, likewise, the ‘Osmanlis’ strategic reverse in 
a.d. 1529, when they failed to capture Vienna and thereby failed to 
crack the still tender carapace of a new-born Danubian Hapsburg 
Monarchy, 1 was eclipsed in the eyes of contemporaries by the preceding 
overthrow of Hungary in a.d. 1526 in the last round of a Hungaro- 
Ottoman Hundred Years’ War. Contemporary Western observers 
shuddered to sec a Western Christian kingdom go the way of its Ortho¬ 
dox Christian neighbours. Yet the carving of a new pashalyq of Buda 
out of Western Christendom’s south-eastern flank, which was all that 
the Ottoman Empire eventually gained from the Battle of Mohacz, was 
a trifling advantage by comparison with the adverse effect of the other 
consequences of this battle on Ottoman prospects of farther expansion 
in this quarter. The severity of the disaster that had overtaken Hungary 
stimulated the Western World to provide itself with a Danubian Haps¬ 
burg carapace which, in the next chapter of the story, proved strong 
enough, in the two ordeals of a.d. 1529 and a.d. 1682-3, to resist the 
heaviest blows that Ottoman armies could deliver at this distance from 
their base of operations. 

Vienna, like Tabriz, was just too far beyond the ‘Osmanlis’ effective 
range to go the way of Buda and Erzinjan; and it was noteworthy how 
small a quota of the Western World’s total energies had to be mobilized 
in order to hold the ‘Osmanlis at bay in the Burgenland. The personal 
union, under the House of Hapsburg, of an unconquered remnant of 
the territories of the Hungarian Crown of Saint Stephen with the terri¬ 
tories of the Bohemian Crown and with the Hapsburgs’ own hereditary 
possessions in south-eastern Germany sufficed to bring the ‘Osmanlis 
to a halt on the eastern glacis of Vienna; 2 and the West European 
countries proved able with impunity to ignore the Ottoman peril while 
they were harvesting the opportunities which their conquest of the 
Ocean had brought within their grasp, and were contending with one 
another for possession of these trans-occanic spoils. 

The political schism between the Hapsburg Power and France and 
religious schism between Roman Catholicism and Protestantism, which 
rent Western Christendom in the sixteenth century, were proportionately 
no less devastating than the contemporary breach in the Iranic Muslim 
World between a Sunni Ottoman and a Shi'ite Safawl Power; and a 
sixteenth-century France might have been as valuable an ally for the 
Ottoman Empire in the Mediterranean as a sixteenth-century Safawl 
Empire was for Portugal in the Indian Ocean. The French Mediter¬ 
ranean naval port of Toulon did harbour an Ottoman fleet in the winter 
of a.d. 1543-4; yet Toulon never became an Ottoman counterpart of 
the Portuguese base at Ormuz; and in the Mediterranean, as on the 
Danube, the Hapsburg Power managed to keep the 'Osmanlis in check 
notwithstanding the diversions made by its Western Christian rivals in 
• See II. ii. 179 and V. v. 325. » See II. ii. 179. 



THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 225 

its rear. This ability of the Modem Western World to fight off with one 
hand the Islamic World’s efforts to break out, while the members of the 
Western body politic were warring all the time with one another, gives 
the true measure of the Western World’s superiority over the Islamic 
World in strength even in an age in which the Ottoman Power stood at 
its zenith. 

The least noticed, but not least signal, of all these sixteenth-century 
Ottoman strategic reverses was a failure to undo a master-move in a 
Russian encircling movement. The year a.d. 1569' witnessed the dis¬ 
comfiture of an Ottoman expeditionary force which had been sent via 
the Crimea to break a recently acquired Muscovite hold on the line of 
the Lower Volga 2 and to bring this vital waterway within the Ottoman 
Empire’s reach by digging a canal from the nearest point on the Don to 
connect the Volga with the Black Sea. This abortive Ottoman thrust into 
the Eurasian Steppe was an attempt to reverse a previous change in the 

S olitical map which had been to the ‘Osmanlis’ serious disadvantage. 

ince the opening of the sixteenth century of the Christian Era the 
'Osmanlis had suddenly and unexpectedly been cut off from access 
overland, both south and north of the Caspian, to their Sunni co¬ 
religionists in Central Asia and India. South of the Caspian, the road had 
been blocked by the establishment of a Safawl Empire extending from 
the Caspian to the Persian Gulf; north of the Caspian, it had been 
blocked by two successive Russian forward moves. 3 The year a.d. 1502 
saw the eviction of the last of the epigoni of Chingis Khan’s son Juji 
from the saray (Russict Tsaritzyn) on the bank of the Middle Volga. 4 
Thereafter, in a.d. i 552-4, the Muscovites had conquered not only this 
Mongol horde’s successor-state of Qazan, commanding the confluence 
of the Volga with the Kama, 5 but also its successor-state of Astrakhan, 
commanding the Volga’s mouth. If the 'Osmanlis had succeeded in 
ejecting the Muscovites from the line of the Lower Volga in a.d. 1569, 
they would have cleared for themselves a path over the Eurasian Steppe 
north of the Caspian along which they could have joined hands with 
their Uzbeg Turkish co-religionists who had recently conquered the 
Oxus-Jaxartcs Basin from the Timurids, 6 and with the Khans of Sibir, 

1 Sec Inalcik, H.: The Origin of the Olto’itan-Russian Rivalry and the Don-Volga Canal 
(X569) (Ankara 1948, Tdrk Tarih Kurunui Basimevi), and the present Study, I. i. 374, 
n. 2, and II. ii. 44s. 

* In the General War of a.d. 1939-45, the line of the Lower Volga was the scene of 
one of the decisive battles of history (eommissum 22 Nov. 1942-2 Feb. 1943). The out¬ 
come of the military operations in the ssme theatre in A.D. 1560, which was perhaps of 
equal importance, was consummated without any direct clash of arms between the 
Russian forces and the alien invader. In a.d. 1569 the Grand Vizier Mchmcd SbkflllO’s 
grand design of reopening the severed communications between the Ottoman Empire 
and the Sunni Muslim Turkish states of Central Asia by opening up a Don-Volga inland 
waterway between the Black Sea and the Caspian was frustrated, without any need for 
military intervention on Muscovy’s part, by the ill will and bad faith of the Khan of the 
Crimea and by the insubordination of the Janissaries, whose Rumelian souls revolted 


against a prospect of having to pass the winter in a clime that was far bleaker than an 
Azerbaijanian Qarabfigh (see I. i. 386). _ 1 See I. i. 398. 

* Sadly stood on the left bank of the Volga, in the an$le of its westward bend adjoining 
the eastward bend of the Don. On the opposite bank in a.d. 1556 the Russians built a 
fort called Tsaritzyn which became famous in A.D. 1942-3 under the name of Stalingrad. 

s See p. 217, above. 

6 See I. i. 371-5. Requests received by the Porte from the Khans of Khiva (Khwi- 
rizm), Bukhara, and Samarqar.d for Ottoman action to reopen the pilgrimage route, via 

B 2 S 9 S.vui I 



226 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
whose horde on the Great Northern Bay of the Eurasian Steppe, in the 
Tobol Basin east of the Ural Mountains, was converted to Sunnism 1 
on the morrow of the 'Osmanlis’ abortive expedition to the Volga and on 
the eve of the Cossacks’ subsequent successful passage of the Urals. 

If, in a.d. 1569, the ‘Osmanlis had attained their military objective, 
three important political results would have followed. The Sunn! Muslim 
World, which had been split asunder by the eruption of Imami Shi'ism 
in Iran, would have been reunited along a corridor to the north of the 
Caspian; the resurgent Shi’i Power would have been encircled and pos¬ 
sibly crushed; and the threat to which the Islamic World’s north¬ 
eastern flank had been exposed by the Russian conquest of Qazan in 
a.d. 1552 would have been neutralized, since the Cossacks’ passage of 
the Urals in a.d. 1586 would have been forestalled by the erection of an 
effective Islamic barrier across the next stage of their eastward path. The 
Cossacks’ fire-arms would not have been able to make the short work 
that they did make of the Siberian Tatars’ resistance if the Tatar archers 
had been reinforced by Ottoman matchlock-men who could have fought 
the Cossacks on equal terms. 2 

In the event, the reverse suffered by the 'Osmanlis on the Don-Volga 
Steppe in a.d. i 569 not only left the way open for the Cossacks to pour 
over the Urals into Siberia; it gave the signal for them to perform, 
before the close of the sixteenth century, the more audacious feat of 
sealing the severance of the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe 
from its heartland east of the Caspian by bounding forward from the 
line of the Dniepr to the lines of the Don, the Terek, and the Yaik. 3 
This triple Cossack reinforcement of a Muscovite breakwater along the 
line of the Lower Volga that had held firm against the ‘Osmanlis created 
a system of defence in depth that was too strong to be breached by the 
Nomads. The last of all the eruptions of Eurasian Nomadism did sweep 
across the Yaik and the Volga in a.d. 1616; but it was halted at the line 
of the Don and never reached the line of the Dniepr; 4 and the Nomads 
who rode out on this forlorn hope were not Turkish-speaking proselytes 
of an Iranic Muslim Civilization but Mongol-speaking Calmuck neo¬ 
phytes of a Tantric Mahayanian Church which had survived as a fossil 
in a Tibetan fastness. 

It will be seen that the failure of the Ottoman attempt to break into 
the heart of the Eurasian Steppe in a.d. 1569 was fraught with the gravest 
consequences for the Islamic World; but the significance of this Ottoman 
reverse was obscured by the continuance, for at least 160 years thcrc- 

AstrakhSn, from Central Asia to Mecca, which the Russian occupation of Astrakhan had 
closed, appear to have weighed with the Porte in the taking of its decision to launch the 
adventurous expedition of a . d . 1569 (see Inalcik, op. cit., pp. 68 and 73). The Porte was 
sensitive to such appeals because its prestige in a Sunni Muslim World was bound up 
with ita title to the guardianship of the Two Holy Cities of the Hij 5 z, which it had taken 
over from the Mamlflk Sultan of Egypt when it had extinguished the MamlOk Power 
in A.D. 15x7. « See p. 219, above. 

2 A trial of strength in Western Siberia in the last quarter of the sixteenth century 
between 'Osmanlis and Muscovites, both cauippcd with fire-arms of Modem Western 
origin, would have been a counterpart of the similar contest that actually took place 
between Ottoman and Portuguese matchlock-men in Abyssinia in a.d. 1542-3 (we II. 
11. 36C-6 and 445 ). 

* Sec II. ii. 157 and V. v. 314-15. 


4 See V. v. 3x5. 



THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 227 

after, of Crimean Tatar slave-raids into Muscovite territory. In a book 
published in a.d. 1668 an English observer, Sir Paul Rycaut, estimated 
that, at the time when he was making his observations, the average 
annual import of slaves from Krim Tatary to Constantinople was at 
least tw-enty-thousand head. 1 Russia continued to suffer from this 
scourge throughout the reign of Peter the Great, and an effective Russian 
limes in the Ukraine was not constructed till a.d. 1730-4, in the reign of 
the Empress Anna. 2 Though these slave-raids were of no military 
importance, 3 they sustained the illusion that the Ottoman Empire was 
on the offensive, and Muscovy on the defensive, for more than a century 
and a half after the roles had been reversed in fact. 

This mirage of an unimpaired Islamic military power long continued 
to bemuse, not only the Muslims themselves, but also their Western 
adversaries. The continuing prestige of the Islamic Civilization in 
Western eyes is attested by the continuance into the eighteenth century' 
of conversions to Islam among Western Christians who were neither 
victims of the Barbary slave-raiders nor prisoners of war, but were 
voluntary entrants into the Ottoman service. 4 The non-converted 
Western Christian employee of the Porte was a rare figure before the 
nineteenth century and cut a poor figure during the first half of it; s and, 

' Rycaut, Sir Paul: The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (London 1668, Starkey 
and Bromc), p. Sr, cited in III. iii. 35, n. 3. 

* Sec Sumner, B. H.: Peter the Great and the Ottoman Empire (Oxford 1949, Black- 
well), p. is, n. 3. 

1 For their social and religious importance sec the passage quoted from Rycaut’a 
book, loc. cit., in V. v. no. 

4 In Egypt in A.D. 1801, one of the commanders of the Ottoman forces cooperating 
with the British expeditionary force against the French was a renegade whose original 
name had been Campbell (Walsh, T.: Journal of the Late Campaign in Egypt (London 
1803, Cadell and Davies), p. 66). The sensational ‘conversion’ of the French general 
Menou to Islam during the French occupation of Egypt in A.D. 1798-1801 was almost 
certainly insincere. 

s The outstanding eighteenth-century representative of his kind was the French 
military officer Baron de Tott, who was employed by the Porte, during the Great Russo- 
Turkish War of a.d. 1768-74, to fortify the Dardanelles in the Western style of the day 
after a Russian fleet from the Baltic had confounded all Turkish notions of geography 

a appearing in the Mediterranean and destroying the Ottoman fleet in the Battle of 
tshme {commitmm 7 July, a.d. 1770). The allegation that dc Tott became a convert 
to Islam is denied by his English translator (Memoirs of the Baron de Tott on the Turks 
and the Tartars, translated from the French by an English gentleman at Paris under the 
immediate inspection of the Baron (London 178c, Jarvis, 2 vols.), vol. i,pp. xvii-xxiv): 

‘Mr. de Tott has stated to the translator the impracticability of the Turks receiving 
any essential permanent instructions from the Europeans, on this... principle, viz. that, 
the instant their instructor becomes a Mahometan, he is looked upon as a fellow subject 
and is reduced to a level with themselves, besides the contempt naturally attending a 
forced conversion; and, if he remains a Christian, he has insuperable obstacles to over¬ 
come, even with the unusual and improbable protection and firmness of 0 Sultan 
Mustapha. Amongst others, the famous Mr. dc Bonneval, whose history made so much 
noise at the beginning of this century, may be rated as an example of the truth of this 
observation. No Christian con ever be more respectably situated than Mr. de Tott; yet 
even his regulations produced only a momentary effect, and are already fallen into decay’ 
(ibid., pp. xx-xxi). 

The translator supports Baron de Tott’s contention by going on to report two anec¬ 
dotes related to him by the Baron himself. Incidentally the Baron testified ‘that he had 
never received a farthing from the Porte, nor any other appointment than that of his 
own Court’ (ibid., p. xxi). 

Sixty-five years or so later, the position of Frankish employees in the Ottoman service 
was still what it had been in de Tott’s day, on the testimony of the famous Prussian 
soldier Hclmuth von Moltke, who served an apprenticeship in the Ottoman Empire in 
the years a.d. 1835-1839 as a member of a Prussian military mission to the Porte. Von 
Moltke records that at this date the Ottoman high command could not venture to outrage 





228 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
even after the renegade had ceased to be the typical Western employee 
in Dar-al-Isl 5 m, a Western homage to the attractiveness of the Islamic 
culture which had formerly taken the radical form of religious conversion 
to the Islamic Faith was still paid in the superficial, yet nevertheless 
psychologically significant, form of the wearing of Islamic dress by 
Western Christian travellers in the Islamic World, as well as by Western 
Christian residents there. While this change of costume had the effect of 
serving as a practical precaution against the danger of arousing a Muslim 
population’s latent fanaticism by flaunting Frankish clothes which, in 
early nineteenth-century Muslim eyes, were still the badge of Unbelief, 1 
the primary motive was never this utilitarian one, but was always a sense 
of admiration; 2 and this hard-dying homage of the Modern West to 
Islam did not cease till it extinguished itself by losing its sincerity and 
evaporating into an affectation 3 that is amusingly satirized in Kinglake’s 
portrait* of the English aristocrat, Lady Hester Stanhope {vivebat a.d. 
1776-1839), theatrically aping the part of a sultan’s mother 5 in her 
dilapidated mansion in the Lebanon. 

These psychological causes of the postponement, for some two 
hundred years, of a doom to which the Islamic World had been 
inexorably condemned before the sixteenth century was over, were 
reinforced by an economic cause and a political one. 

The economic cause was the commercial stagnation of the Mediter¬ 
ranean Sea for some three hundred years after the conquest of the Ocean 
by the West European peoples at the close of the fifteenth century. In its 


the Muslim feelings of even its Western-trained troops by ordering them to present 
arms to officers who were gyaours, even when these gyaour officers were, like von Moltke 
and his colleagues (and also like de Tott in his day), the servants of a foreign sovereign 
and not of the Pidishlh. ‘We’, von Moltke writes, 'were highly distinguished individual 
representatives of an abysmally low-rated category. ... As for Pranks who offer their 
services to the Turks for pay, these naturally find themselves in an immeasurably poorer 
position; and the natural result is that (with a few most honourable exceptions) the only 
Franks who contrive to endure it are of the kind that is prepared to submit to every sort 
of humiliation. People offer themselves as teachers in Turkey who have been bad pupils 
at home’ (Moltke, H. von: Briefe iiber ZuslGndcn und Btgebenheilcn dir Tiirkei (Berlin 
1841, Mittlcr), p. 414). 

* According to a report from Col. Campbell to Sir John Bowring, incorporated in the 
latter’s Report on Eg)'f>t and Can Jin dated the 27th March, 1839 (London 1840, Clowes), 
p. 190, Frankish clothes were by that date commanding respect instead of exciting con¬ 
tempt in Egypt. In Damascus, on the other hand, Frankish clothes were still not to be 
seen (Bowring, J.: Report on the Commercial Statistics oj Syria, dated the 17th July, 
1839 (London 1840, Clowes), p. 92). 

2 Perhaps the most remarkable of all Modern Western sartorial tributes to the abid¬ 
ing prestige of a decadent Islamic Civilization was the nineteenth-century and twentieth- 
century French and British practice of dressing even European troops in uniforms of an 
Islamic style. The Maghribi fez, jacket, and baggy trousers of the French zouave (suw- 
war) had their counterpart in the turban worn by the English officer in a British Indian 
cavalry regiment—a headgear which proclaimed the British Raj to be the Mughal Raj’s 
heir. 

1 See Clot-Bey, A. B.; Aperfu Gcntral sur L‘£gypte (Paris 1840, Fortin et Masson, 
2 vols.), vol. ii, pp. 150-1. 

* Kinglakc, A. W.: Eothtn (tst ed., 1844). chap. 8. 

‘ The wife of an Ottoman sultan came into power if and when her son succeeded her 
husband on the imperial throne; and an Herodotus would have noted with amusement 
that the accident of becoming a widow, for which a woman was penalized in the Hindu 
World by being sent to the funeral pyre to be burnt alive, and in the Western World 
by being sent to the dower house to die of ennui there, was rewarded in the Islamic 
World by the enjoyment, as a widowed mother, of a status and a licence never accorded 
to a wife during her husband's lifetime. 



THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 229 

preoccupation with the task of opening up for itself this vaster and more 
lucrative field of enterprise, 1 the West was content to abandon the 
Levant to Ottoman Greek mariners 2 and the Western Mediterranean to 
Barbary pirates 1 till, as a result of its very success in acquiring an 
oecumenical empire by exploiting its command of oceanic routes, it had 
built up in India and the Far East such substantial interests that the re¬ 
opening of a direct route between India and Western Europe now became 
a matter of importance to West European governments and men of 
business. 

The chief landmark in the history of this change in the Western 
attitude towards the Mediterranean was the British East India Com¬ 
pany’s acquisition of a virtual sovereignty over Bengal in a.d. 1757-60. 
Thenceforward the finding of a short cut between a rapidly expanding 
British Raj in India and this renascent Indian Empire’s new metropolis 
in the British Isles became a more and more earnestly pursued object of 
British policy, 4 and, in an age of Western ascendancy, this renewed 
Western interest in the Mediterranean 5 spelled Western military and 
political intervention in the life of the Islamic countries possessing 
Mediterranean seaboards or situated on the land-bridge between the 
Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. In the fifteenth century the 
Western peoples’ main inducement to seek an ocqanic route, however 
circuitous, from Western Europe to India had been the Western Powers’ 
inability to control a short route via the Mediterranean and the Red Sea 
or the Persian Gulf, because this route was bestridden by Islamic 
Powers whom the West was not then strong enough to coerce. In the 
eighteenth century, Egypt and Syria were still in the hands of their 
former Mamluk Muslim masters’ Ottoman Muslim conquerors and 
successors, but by this date the ‘Osmanlis were no longer capable of 
defending their empire against Western or Westernizing aggressors, 
and the Western Powers could therefore now have, for the taking, a 
Mediterranean route between India and Western Europe which would 
not only be shorter than the Cape route but would also be as fully at 
their command in the military and political circumstances of the day— 
always supposing that the alien competitors for the Islamic World’s 
spoils could agree with one another over the division of them. 

As it turned out, this essential condition of agreement was never 
attained, and the diplomatic and military energy expended in the nine¬ 
teenth and twentieth centuries by each of the Powers on thwarting its 

« The West European peoples’ preoccupation with the Ocean and indifference to the 
Mediterranean in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries is comparable to 
the American people’s preoccupation with their own continent and indifference to 
Europe in the nineteenth century. 

* See pp. 173 - 7 . above. * See p. 121, above. 

* See Hoskins, H. L.: British Routes to India (London 1028, Longmans Green). _ 

» The British had shown an interest in the Western Mediterranean since the begin¬ 
ning of the eighteenth century. They had acquired Gibraltar in A.D. 1704, campaigned 
in Catalonia in A.D. 1704-12, and held Minorca from a.d. 1708 to a.d. 1782. The conflict 
between Great Britain and France which led to these results was, however, a war of the 
Spanish, not the Mughal or the Ottoman, succession; and, even after Malta had come 
into British hands in a.d. 1798 in the Napoleonic round of the Anglo-French duel, 
another generation was to pass before a through-route between England and India vis 
the Mediterranean was to be established by the spanning of the gap between Malta and 
Suez in the direct British line of communications between England and India. 





230 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
rivals’ designs on the territorial integrity of the Ottoman Empire would 
probably have sufficed to prolong the Ottoman Empire’s life for the 
hundred years and more by which it actually exceeded its natural ex¬ 
pectation, even if the ‘Osmanlis themselves had never made the attempt 
to save their house from destruction by reconstructing it in a Modern 
Western style under the spur of shocking military defeats. 

Though the discomfiture by British arms of a moribund Mughal 
Empire’s local viceroy in Bengal might do little to upset Islamic com¬ 
placency, and might be regarded in the West mainly as an incident in a 
struggle over India between Great Britain and France, the defeat of the 
Ottoman Empire by Russia in the Great Russo-Turkish War of a.d. 
1768-74 was taken everywhere as a portent; and, when in a.d. 1798 the 
French descended upon the Ottoman dominion of Egypt, and overcame 
all resistance there with ease, 1 as a step towards reopening in India a 
contest with their British rivals which had been decided there against 
France in the Seven Years’ War, even shrewd observers took it for 
granted that they would live to see the Ottoman Empire partitioned 
between France, Russia, Great Britain, and the Danubian Hapsburg 
Monarchy. Yet this expectation, natural though it was at the time, was 
not fulfilled in the event; for the only parts of the Ottoman Empire, with¬ 
in its frontiers of a.d. 1768, which were in the possession of any of those 
foreign Powers in a.d. 1952 were the territories adjoining the north and 
cast coasts of the Black Sea, from Bessarabia to Batum inclusive, which 
had fallen to Russia; Cyprus, which had fallen to Great Britain; and 
Tunisia and Algeria, which had fallen to France. As for the Danubian 
Hapsburg Monarchy, which had held Bosnia-Herzegovina from a.d. 
1878 to a.d. 1918 and the sanjaq of NovipazSr from a.d. 1879 to A D - 

S »8, she had voluntarily evacuated Novipazar and had lost Bosnia- 
rzegovina in the act of losing her own existence. 2 The lion’s share of 
the Ottoman Empire of a.d. 1768, from Bosnia to the Yaman and from 
Tripolitania 3 to Moldavia inclusive, had passed into the hands, not of 
alien Great Powers, but of Orthodox Christian and Muslim successor- 
states, of which the largest in area—apart from a mostly arid Sa'udI 
Arabia—was a Turkish Republic stretching from Adrianoplc to Mount 
Ararat. 

This remarkable triumph of the nineteenth-century Western political 
ideal of Nationalism on alien ground could hardly, however, have been 
achieved by the feeble and discordant efforts of the surprisingly liberated 
local peoples if the surrounding Great Powers had not thrust this prize 
into their hands by frustrating one another and thereby creating a 
political vacuum which, when the maintenance of Ottoman sovereignty 


1 See IV. iv. 458-60. 

1 The occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina in and after a . d . 1878, and annexation of this 
occupied Ottoman territory in a . d . 1908, had. indeed, been nails driven into the Haps¬ 
burg Monarchy’s coffin by its own statesmen’s hands, since these Hapsburg acts of 
aggression against a moribund Ottoman Empire had had the effect of bringing the 
Monarchy into a head-on collision with a youthful Serb nationalism. 

> A ‘Libya’ consisting of Cyrcnaica, Tripolitania, and Fazzan, which had been con¬ 
quered from the Ottoman Empire by Italy in a.d. t 9 ir-r 2 , and from Italy by Great 
Britain in the general war of A.D. I 939 " 45 . had attained independence on the 24th 
December, 1951. 



THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 231 

proved no longer possible, all the Powers alike preferred to see occupied 
by local successor-states rather than by any of the Great Powers’ own 
number. 

The suzerainty of the Porte over Egypt, for example, was prolonged, 
after all, from a.d. 1798 to a.d. 1924 thanks in the first place to the 
military intervention of Great Britain in a.d. 1801 —when British and 
British Indian expeditionary forces cooperated with an Ottoman 
expeditionary force in compelling the French invaders to capitulate— 
and in the second place to the diplomatic intervention of all the Great 
Powers of the day except France in a.d. 1840-1, when they compelled 
the Ottoman viceroy of Egypt, Mehmcd 'All, not only to evacuate all 
Asiatic territories of the Ottoman Empire but also to rcacknowledgc the 
suzerainty of the Porte over the African Ottoman territories that were 
being left in his hands, in consideration of his receiving from the Porte 
a grant of the governorship of Egypt for himself and his heirs, and a 
grant of the governorship of the Sudan for himself for life. In the next 
chapter of Egyptian history the occupation of Egypt by Great Britain in 
a.d. 1882 ended, not, as might have been expected, in the replacement of 
Ottoman suzerainty by British sovereignty, but, like the French occupa¬ 
tion of a.d. 1798-1801, in an eventual evacuation—though in this chapter 
of the story the Western occupation lasted fifty-four years (a.d. 1882- 
1936) instead of three, and was followed, not by a reassertion of Ottoman 
suzerainty, but by a general recognition of Egyptian independence. 

In a different quarter, all but an outermost fringe of the Ottoman 
dominions in Rumelia and Anatolia was saved from falling into Russia’s 
hands by the diplomatic action of the other Powers in a.d. 1839 and a.d. 
1878, and by the military intervention of three of them—France, Great 
Britain, and Sardinia—on the Ottoman Empire’s behalf in the Crimean 
War (gerebatur a.d. 1853-5); and Russia took an appropriate diplomatic 
revenge when, in a.d. 1921, a nascent Soviet Union helped a nascent 
Turkish Republic to save itself from an Anglo-Grcek attack which was 
already being hampered by the hostility of France and Italy to any 
further augmentation of their British ally’s power at Turkey’s expense. 
Thanks to the stalemate of power politics in this long-drawn-out game 
of chess, the Ottoman heritage in Anatolia and Rumelia was preserved 
for eventual distribution between a Turkish Republic and the Ottoman 
Empire’s South-East European successor-states. 

The independence of Afghanistan, likewise, was preserved, not only 
by the valour of the Afghans in the first and second Anglo-Afghan wars, 
but by a rivalry between Great Britain and Russia which moved the 
British to bolster up Afghanistan as a buffer-state between India and 
Russia rather than to risk driving the Afghans into Russia’s arms by 
attempting the completion of a conquest which would have been not 
beyond Great Britain’s power, in spite of all Afghan efforts to resist it, 
if the rival Russian Empire had not loomed up over the British Indian 
horizon. 

As for Persia and the Asiatic Arab successor-states of the Ottoman 
Empire outside the Arabian Peninsula, their experience of Russian and 
Western imperialism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had been, 



232 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
down to the year a.d. 1952, much the same as Egypt’s. They had 
managed, after all, to preserve their independence after having been 
perilously caught in the toils. In a.d. 1952 Persia was still independent, 
within frontiers that were approximately those with which she had 
emerged from the Russo-Persian peace-settlement of a.d. i 828, though in 
a.d. 1907 she had been subjected, without being consulted, to the begin¬ 
nings of a partition by the terms of the Anglo-Russian agreement of that 
year. Her unity had been restored in a.d. 1917, when the Russian as well 
as the ‘neutral’ and the British zone of Persia had fallen into the British 
lion’s maw as a result of Russia’s collapse in the First World War; 1 and 
her independence had been restored in a.d. 1921 when the Soviet Union 
—seeking to protect her ‘soft under-belly’ by turning Persia, as well as 
Turkey, into a buffer against British attack—constrained Great Britain 
to withdraw her troops from Persian soil by a show of force on Persia’s 
Caspian coast. As a result of the Ottoman Empire’s dissolution in the 
First World War, ‘Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine had fallen into the 
hands of Great Britain, and Syria and the Lebanon into the hands of 
France; yet, in the sequel, none of these Arab countries had gone the 
way that India and the Maghrib had gone during the hundred years 
ending in a.d. 1914. All of them except Palestine had, after all, secured 
at least a temporary independence as Arab national states—the French 
mandated territories owing to the action of Great Britain on their behalf 
during the Second World War—and the Palestinian Arabs had lost their 
country neither to Great Britain nor to Russia but to the Zionists. 

Thus the rivalries between Great Britain and France, between Great 
Britain and Russia, and between Russia and the Danubian Hapsburg 
Monarchy had preserved the political independence of the core of the 
Islamic World within limits that have been indicated. 2 Each Power had 
taken its turn in preventing its rivals from appropriating the heritage of 
the Islamic Powers and their successor-states; but the Muslim peoples 
had not been entirely passive beneficiaries of this favourable equilibrium 
of alien political forces; for, though the military and political reverses 
which they had suffered in and after a.d. 1768 had not put an end to 
their political independence, the shock of successive disasters had 
nevertheless brought into play the compelling motive of self-preserva¬ 
tion, and this spur had driven the Muslim peoples to enter reluctantly 
upon a course of Westernization in which it had proved impossible to 
call a halt when once the momentous initial step had been taken. 

The Muslim Peoples' Military Approach to the Western Question 

The clues to an understanding of the Muslim peoples’ approach to 
‘the Western Question’ are to be found in three circumstances. At the 
time when the impact of the Modern West became the dominant 
problem in their lives, the Muslim peoples—like the Russians and unlike 
the Ottoman Orthodox Christians at the corresponding crises in their 
histories—were still politically their own masters; they were also the 
heirs of a great military tradition which was the warrant of the Islamic 

1 The short title by which the General War of a.d. 1914-18 was coming to be known 
by the time of writing. a See p. 230, above. 



THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 233 

Civilization’s value in its children’s own eyes; and the sudden demon¬ 
stration of their latter-day military decadence by the unanswerable 
logic of defeat in ordeal by battle 1 was as surprising to them as it was 
humiliating. 

The Muslims’ complacency over their historic military prowess was 
so deeply ingrained in their souls that the lesson implicit in the turn of 
the military tide in their Western adversaries’ favour in a.d. 1683 had 
not yet made any appreciable impression on them by the time when, 
little short of a hundred years later, this lesson was on the point of being 
more sharply driven home. When, after the outbreak of war between 
the Ottoman Empire and Russia in a.d. 1768, it was common knowledge 
in Western Europe that the Russians were intending to bring into action 
a navy in the Modern Western style of that day which they had built up 
in the Baltic, the Porte declined to believe in the physical possibility of 
navigating ships from the Baltic into the Mediterranean till a Russian 
squadron duly turned up in the Levant to the consternation of an 
adversary who was so obstinately unprepared to cope with it. 2 Even 
after this painfully revealing Ottoman experience in the Great Russo- 
Turkish War of a.d. 1768-74, the Egyptian Mamluks could not be 
persuaded that they stood in any danger from their 'Osmanli conquerors’ 
latter-day Western pupils in the art of war. When the Mamluk war-lord 
Mur 5 d Bey was warned by the Venetian business man Rosetti, the 
doyen of the Frankish community in Egypt, that Napoleon’s seizure of 
Malta might be the prelude to a descent on Egypt, Murad Bey burst out 
laughing at the absurdity of such an idea; 3 and, on the very eve of the 
catastrophe, the governor of Alexandria was equally impervious to a 
still more urgent warning given him by a landing-party from Nelson’s 
fleet. 4 

The shock of the denouement was proportionately severe; 5 yet the 
Mamluks’ humiliation in a.d. 1798 was not so painful as the ‘Osmanlis’ 
in a.d. 1774, for the Russians at whose hands the 'Osmanlis had suffered 
their defeat were not even Franks; they were creatures of the same clay 
as the ‘Osmanlis’ Orthodox Christian ra'iyeh , 6 and their country was 
known to the ‘Osmanlis, not as a formidable military Power, but as 
the happy hunting-ground of the ‘Osmanlis’ slave-raiding Krim Tatar 

* The dramatic exposure of the decadence of the Egyptian Mamluks by a French 
infantry whose equipment and training were originally derived from those of the Otto¬ 
man Janissaries in their prime has been noticed in IV. iv. 454-61. 

* ‘Whilst the weakness of the government compelled it to shut its eyes to the excesses 

of a licentious soldiery, the ministers strove to conceal the naval war which threatened 
the Empire. No Russian vessel had ever made its appearance at Constantinople. The 
Russians, therefore, have no ships; or, if by chance they have any, what does that signify 
to the Turks, since there is no communication between the Baltic and the Archipelago? 
The Danes, the Swedes, whose flags are known to the Turks, could not overturn that 
argument in their minds; maps spread out before their eyes had no more effect; and the 
Divan was not yet persuaded of the possibility of the fact when they received intelligence 
of the siege of Coron, the invasion of the Mores, and of the appearance of twelve of the 
enemy's line-of-batt!e ships’ (dc Tott, Baron: Memoirs on the Turks and the Tartars, 
English translation (London 1785, Jarvis, 2 volsj, vol. ii, pp. 14-15). . 

J Clot-Bey, A. B.: Aptrfu Central sur VEgypte (Paris 1840, Fortin ct Masson, 
2 vols.), vol. ii, p. 163. 

* Sec the passage quoted in IV. iv. 458-60 from Shaykh Abd-ar-RahmSn al- 

Jabartl: 'Ajd'ib-al-Athar fi’t-Tardjim uaT-Akhbdr. ..... 

* See Clot-Bey, op. tit., vol. ii, p. 164. 6 See III. ui. 48. 


B 2408 .vui 


12 



234 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
vassals. Yet Muscovy had now signally defeated the Ottoman Empire in 
the field by means of a borrowed Frankish military technique. In fact, 
this Russian victory over Ottoman arms was a Frankish victory at 
second-hand; and, to produce such an effective result through such an 
incompetent agency, Frankish military methods must be potent indeed. 
By starting this train of thought in dismayed Ottoman minds, the 
victorious Empress Catherine II prepared the ground in Turkey for the 
military reforms of Sultan Selim III, while in Egypt a victorious 
Napoleon was in the same sense the forerunner of Mehmed ‘All . 1 

In the Ottoman World at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth 
centuries, as in the Russian World at the turn of the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries, the aftermath of defeat by a Modern Western war- 
machine was a Westernizing movement from above downwards, begin¬ 
ning with a remodelling of the armed forces. 

‘Ce ne sont jamais les peuples qui font les civilisations, ce sont de 
grandes individuality qui les imposent presque toujours par la lutte et 
par la violence', 

wrote Clot Bey , 2 the French physician whom Mehmed ‘All took into 
his service in a.d. 1825 with a mandate to make provision on Western 
lines for the health of the Pasha of Egypt’s new Westernized army ; 2 and, 
though a generalization from Mehmed ‘All's career does not hold good 
for all the instances of Westernizing revolutions within an historian’s 
purview, the French director of Mehmed 'All’s military medical sendee 
was entirely correct in declaring in a.d. 1840: 

‘C’est l’armde et les nombreux appendices qui s’y rattachent qui ont 
dom \6 h l’figypte l’impulsion civilisatrice qui l'entrainc aujourd’hui . . . 4 
Tout dtait a fairc, et tout a commencd h litre fait h la suite de I’organisation 
militaire.’* 

In the Ottoman Empire, as in Russia, this Westernization from above 
and from a military point of departure cast military officers for the role of 
liberal revolutionaries. The successful revolt of the ‘Young 'Osmanli' 
Committee of Union and Progress in a.d. 1908 against the autocracy 
of Sultan 'Abd-al-Hamid II is the counterpart, in point of personnel, of 
the abortive revolt of the Decembrists against the autocracy of Tsar 
Nicholas I in a.d. 1S25. The leaders of the Decembrists were mostly 
Guards officers, 6 recruited from the Russian nobility, 7 who had served 

1 See Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii. p. 165. * Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 167. 

5 Sec Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 369-70. 

♦ Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 167. 

» Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii,Jp. J99; cp. p. 200. Sir John Bowring expresses an iden¬ 
tical opinion in his Report on Egypt and Candia (London 1840, Clowes), p. 49. 

6 In thus once again attempting to play a dominant and decisive role in Petrine 
Russia*8 political life, the officers of the Imperial Guard were not, in a.d. 1823, taking 
a new departure. 'For exactly a hundred year* from Peter's death’ in a.d. 1725, the 
Guards had 'decided either the accession or the maintenance on the throne of every 
empress or emperor’ (Sumner, B. H.: Peter the Great and the Emergence oj Russia (London 

7 See Le Monde Slave, Nouvelle Sdrie, 2me Annde, No. 12, Dcccmbre,^i 925 *(Paris 
1923. Alcan): ‘Ccntcnaire des Ddcabristes’ p. 334, Paul Pestel, the leader of the moder¬ 
ate Southern Group, was a free-thinking Protestant of German origin, whose mother 
had lived at the Saxon Court at Dresden (ibid., pp. 360, 369, and 370). 



THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 235 
in the Russian army of occupation in France after the overthrow of 
Napoleon 1 and were impressed, not so much by the legend of the 
French Revolution, as by the constitutional monarchy which had been 
inaugurated under their eyes in a post-Napoleonic France. 1 The ring¬ 
leaders in the ‘Young ‘Osmanli’ revolution of a.d. 1908 were likewise 
mostly military officers 3 who—in a generation which ‘Abd-al-Hamld’s 
censorship had done its worst to starve of Western intellectual food for 
fear of this infecting them with ‘dangerous thought’—had enjoyed almost 
a monopoly of licensed access to contemporary Western sources of know¬ 
ledge and inspiration, because even an ‘Abd-al-Hamid had perceived 
that without Western-educated officers he could not have a Westernized 
army, and that without a Westernized army he would soon find himself 
an autocrat without an empire. 

No doubt the tyrant’s intention was that the Western studies of his 
military cadets should be strictly confined to technical military manuals, 
but it proved beyond the wit of a secret police to ensure that intelligent 
and idealistic-minded young men should pick nothing but this stony 
fruit from the tree of Modern Western knowledge when a wicket-gate 
into a Western intellectual paradise had once been opened to them. 4 A 
twentieth-century Ottoman, like a nineteenth-century Russian, auto¬ 
cracy was indeed in a dilemma from which it could not escape. If it was 
to insure itself against a danger of being conquered by militarily efficient 
neighbours, it must win military efficiency for itself by providing itself 

1950, English Universities Press), p. 137; cp. eundem: Peter the Great end the Ottoman 
Empire (Oxford 1949, Blackwell), p. 9). The two new phenomena in a.d. 1825, were, first, 
that on this occasion the Russian Imperial Guard—duly keeping abreast of the movement 
of Western political ideas—were taking action on behalf, no longer of enlightened auto¬ 
cracy, but of parliamentary constitutional monarchy (see p. 551, n. 3, below), and, second, 
that this time—for the first time in a hundred years—their intervention in politics was 
unsuccessful. From first to last, Peter’s new-rr.odel Imperial Guard had been the spear¬ 
head of the Westernization movement in Russia which Peter had inaugurated. 

‘The Guards were drawn from the landowning families, but they served for life and 
had been brought up in the full spate of Peter’s reforms. They had grown to manhood 
unhabituated to the traditional Muscovite ways, and were, for the most part, ardent sup¬ 
porters and admirers of their creator . . . Peter used the Guards more and more fre¬ 
quently on all manner of extraordinary, non-military missions, notably to bring to book 
those in high authority.... In the latter part of the reign . . . [they] became something 
like misii dominici. . . . Their official appellation, "compellcrs", speaks volumes. In 
earlier years Peter used them in the Army to compel other troops to discipline; now in 
his closing years he used them in government to compel authorities, high and low alike, 
to behave themselves and cany out the law. They were, as it were, a personal extension 
of Peter’s own thunderclap will’ (Sumner, Peter the Great and the Emergence of Ruuia, 
pp. 36-71). 

1 Sec Masaryk, T. G.: The Spirit of Russia , English translation (London 1919, Allen 
and Unwin, 2 vols.), vol. i, p. 97. The political education of at least two officers of the 
younger generation who played leading parts in the Turkish Revolution of A.D. 1908— 
Enver Bey and Fethi Bey Okyar—was likewise completed by a period of service in the 
Western World; but in both these Turkish military careers the sojourn in the West 
came after, not before, the revolution at home. Enver served as Turkish military attachd 
in Berlin between the revolution of a.d. 1908 and the suppression of the counter¬ 
revolution of a.d. 1909; Fethi served in a.d. 1909 as Turkish military attach* in Paris. 

j See Le Monde Slave, loc. cit., pp. 378-9. 

» Among these, Enver and Jemal won immediate celebrity, but Mustafa Kemal and 
Fethi lived to eam a deservedly greater reputation as leaders of the far more fruitful 
Turkish national movement of a.d. 1919, while the brain of the conspiracy that came to 
a head in a.d. 1908 was not a soldier at all but was the Salonican telegraph clerk Tal'at. 

* Muslim ‘Osmanlis had begun to read Western newspapers since the morrow” of the 
Great Russo-Turkish War of a.d. 1768-74 (Jorga, N.: Geschichle det Osmaniscken 
Reiches (Gotha 1908-13, Perthes, 5 vols.), vol. v, p. 44). 



236 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
with fighting forces on the Modern Western pattern; but it could not do 
this without exposing itself to the alternative danger of being destroyed, 
not by foreign conquest, but by domestic revolution, through the recep¬ 
tion of subversive Western political ideas by the professionally Westem- 
trained military officers on whose technical proficiency the military 
quality of the autocracy’s fighting forces depended. This dilemma 
explains the emergence, in both Russian and Ottoman history, of a 
characteristic figure—the liberal revolutionary military officer—which 
was a natural phenomenon in a social no-man’s-land between two con¬ 
flicting cultures, however paradoxical it might appear to be in Western 
eyes accustomed to a middle-class social order in which ‘Liberalism’ and 
‘Militarism’ were mutually exclusive conceptions. 

Up to this point we have been noticing similarities in the courses 
taken by the Westernizing movement on Islamic and on Russian ground; 
but there was at least one point of capital importance in which the two 
movements differed sharply. Peter the Great divined, with the in¬ 
sight of genius, that a policy of Westernization must be ‘all or nothing’. 
He saw that, in order to make a success of it, he must press on without a 
pause when once he had embarked on it, and must apply it to all depart¬ 
ments of life, whatever his particular starting-point might have been. 
Accordingly Peter—setting out, like his Ottoman counterparts, from a 
military point of departure, and being prompted in the first instance, as 
they were prompted, by the motive of self-preservation—never thought 
of coming to a halt at the limits of the military sphere (if any such limits 
could be drawn in the internal economy of a society which, in seeking 
to Westernize its fighting forces, was seeking by definition to equip them 
with technical resources of civilian provenance). Peter forged straight 
ahead from his narrower towards his wider objective; 1 and, though, as 
we have seen, 2 the Petrine regime in Russia never succeeded in Western¬ 
izing more than the urban superstructure of life and ultimately paid the 
penalty for its failure to leaven the rural mass 3 by forfeiting its mandate 
to Communism, this arrest of its cultural offensive short of its compre- • 
hensive goal was due perhaps not so much to failure of vision or to 
inadequacy of agenda as to lack of sufficient driving-power. In Turkey, 
on the other hand, for a century and a half, from the outbreak of the 
Great Russo-Turkish War in a.d. 1768 till after the close of the First 
World War in a.d. 1918, the converts a contre cceur to a policy of 
Westernizing the Ottoman fighting forces continued, in despite of 
successive painful exposures or their fallacy, to hug the illusion that, in 

« See p. 138. above. . . * On p. 140, above. 

» Peter’s 'efforts to improve agriculture were intermittent, sporadic and ineffectual 
(Sumner, Peter the Great and the Emergence of Russia, p. 161), though agriculture was 
the almost exclusive source of Petrine Russia’s wealth, on which such heavy new calls 
were being made by the high-speed Westernization of the fighting forces, administra¬ 
tion, and industry. Moreover, ’so far from attempting to alter serfdom as the basis of 
the state, Peter clamped it down more firmly on the peasantry' (ibid., p. 151; cp- PP- 
157-8). In consequence, the Russian peasantry never came to feel that the Russian State 
was their affair (sec Weidld, W.: La Russie Absents et Present* (Paris 1949, Gallimard), 
pp. 163-4); and, though, in the last days of the Petrine regime, the peasantry was 
courted belatedly by the governing class and its agents as well as by the Intelligentsia— 
Rasputin, as well as Tolstoy, went into peasant dress—the peasantry rejected im¬ 
partially both the Petrine governing class and an Intelligentsia which had been moved to 
secede from it by a sentimental cult of ’the People’ (sec ibid., pp. 110-12 and 183-4). 


THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 237 

adopting elements from an alien culture, it was possible to pick and 
choose—as though a culture were not an organic way of life which must 
be taken or left as a whole. 1 

During that century and a half the prevalent ideal in Ottoman hearts 
was to adopt the alien culture of the Modern Western World to the 
minimum extent required for immediate self-preservation, and it took 
Ottoman minds five generations to learn that the practicable minimum 
was nothing less than the ideal maximum. The judgement on all the 
successive doses of Westernization that the 'Osmanlis administered to 
themselves, with wry faces, in the course of that age of their history is the 
damning verdict: 'Each time too little and too late’; 2 and this verdict 
is said to have been pronounced by the post-Mahmudian ‘Osmanli 
reformer-statesman Mustafa Mehmed Reshid Pasha (vivebat a.d. 
i8o2(?)-58), at the beginning of his career, in the following words: 

‘Le malhcur, e’est qu’il faut nous hater, et qui ne connait l’indolence 
du Musulman et ses insurmontables pr6jugcs! Indolence et pr£jug£s, 
voil& nos plus grands ennemis. Ce sont eux qui arrfitent notre marche, et 
nous devrions count.’ 1 

It was not till a.d. 1919, when this persistent impolicy threatened to 
deprive the Ottoman Turks of their Turkish homeland, after having 
already lost them their non-Turkish subject territories, that Mustafa 
Kemal and his companions committed themselves and their countrymen 
unreservedly to the policy of whole-hearted Westernization on which 
Peter the Great had launched out unhesitatingly as soon as he had 
become master of Russia's destinies. 

This long-pursued Ottoman practice of ‘staggering’ the process of 
Westernization, which cost the ‘Osmanlis so dear before they eventually 
threw it over, was the reflexion of a negative inertia and repugnance 
rather than the expression of any positive policy. At the same time the 
tragedy of the Ottoman Sultan Selim III and the tragi-comedy of the 
Afghan King Am§nall 5 h suggest that the Islamic Westernizers might 
have run the risk of bringing on themselves other serious setbacks if 
they had been quicker to abandon the tactics of 'hastening slowly’ along 
a treacherous westward road. While a Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk found 
himself strong enough, in the fifth generation of an Ottoman Westerniz¬ 
ing movement, to venture deliberately to flout Islamic custom by tearing 
the veils off Muslim women’s faces and compelling the men to wear hats 
with brims in which it was impossible for them to perform their prayer- 
drill, 4 his Ottoman predecessor and his Afghan contemporary both came 
to grief through attempting, in the first generation, to emulate the 
calculated provocativeness of Peter the Great. When Peter inaugurated 
his Westernization campaign by shaving Muscovite beards, this psycho¬ 
logical Blitzkrieg justified its audacity by breaking the spirit of the 
conservative opposition without giving them time to go into action 


» On this question see pp. 542-64. below. 

» Sec II. ii. 186-7 »nd III- iti. 47- . _ 

3 Reshid Pasha, as quoted by Engclhardt, E.: La Turquie et le Tanzlmdt (Pans 1882- 
4, Cotillon [et Pichon, succcsseur], 2 vols.), vol. ii, p. 3 2 S- 
* See V. vi. 102-3. 



238 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
against the impious futurist innovator. But, when Selim III put his 
new model army into uniforms in the Western style, and when Amanallah 
brought back from London 1,001 ready-made suits of Western civilian 
clothes and clad in these the 1,001 members of a Great National 
Assembly (Lee Jirga) of conservative-minded Afghan tribal notables in 
October 1928,’ the Afghan imitator of Peter paid for his audacity with his 
throne, 2 and the ‘Osmanli with his life. 

In the Ottoman World down to the time of writing, a still unconcluded 
drama of Westernization had so far run through four acts. The first act 
was the abortive attempt to Westernize the Ottoman fighting forces 
that was made by Sultan Selim III (imperabat a.d. 1789-1807). The 
second act was an abortive attempt to instil a tincture of Western 
Civilization into Ottoman civil life as a corollary of the successful 
Westernization of the fighting forces in Turkey by Sultan Mahmud II 
(imperabat a.d. 1808-39) an< * * n Egypt by Mehmed ‘All (proconsulari 
munere fungebatur a.d. 1805-49). Both these two great Ottoman Turkish 
Westernizers performed wonders, yet the impetus that they gave to an 
Ottoman Westernizing movement did not outlive its authors for longer 
than a single generation, and the subsequent collapse of their work was 
due, not solely to the incapacity of their epigoni, but also to an inherent 
weakness in the work itself; for, though Mahmud, as well as Mehmed 
‘All, had perceived that it was impossible to Westernize his fighting 
forces effectively without setting them in a Westernized framework of 
civilian life, not even Mehmed 'All had carried this ancillary process of 
Westernization in the civilian sphere deep enough, or far enough afield, 
to provide sufficiently solid civilian foundations for an ambitious military 
superstructure, and the eventual result of this discrepancy was a 
financial, military, and political collapse which overtook Turkey and 
Egypt simultaneously at the turn of the eighth and ninth decades of the 
nineteenth century. In Turkey this unhappy ending of the second 
act was followed by the opening of a third act in a.d. 1908, when the 
Committee of Union and Progress was brought into power by a military 
revolution which compelled Sultan ‘Abd-al-Hamld II to reinstate the 
constitution which he had accepted on the 23rd December, 1876, and 
suspended on the 14th February, 1878. This third act, in its turn, ended 
disastrously for Turkey in seven years of war (a.d. 1911-18) which left her 
not only militarily prostrate but actually in danger of political annihila¬ 
tion. Yet a situation which might have been the end of the play was 
followed, after all, by a fourth act, opening in a.d. 1919, in which the 
Ottoman Turkish people, under the leadership of Ghazi Mustafa Kcmal, 
abandoned the now hopeless task of saving the Ottoman Empire in 
order to concentrate their efforts on the new objective of salvaging out of 
the wreckage a Turkish nation-state whose survival was to be ensured by 
a radical reconstruction on a Western basis. At the time of writing, 
this notable enterprise had been carried successfully through its first 
stage. 

1 See Toynbee, A. J., and Boulter, V. M.: Survey 0] International Affairs, 1928 
(London 1929, Milford), p. 205. 

* For Amanallah’* career, see V. v. 333 and V. vi. 234. 



THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 239 

The Salvaging of an Ottoman Society by Selim III, Mehmed ‘Alt, and 
Mahmud II 

Selim Ill’s pioneer adventure in the Westernization of Turkey had an 
ominous overture in Krim Tatary during the brief interval of nine years 
between the renunciation of Ottoman suzerainty over the Khanate in the 
Russo-Turkish Peace Treaty of Kuchiik Qaynarja ( pactum a.d. 1774)' 
and the annexation of the Khanate by Russia in a.d. 1783. Khan Shahln 
Giray ( regebat a.d. 1777-83), finding himself left at the mercy of a 
victorious Russian Empire that was his immediate neighbour, was 
quicker than his ex-suzerain the Porte to discern, and act upon, the 
signs of the times. He set himself forthwith to Westernize his army; but, 
before this pathetic attempt to retrieve a desperate situation was crushed 
by Russia’s heavy hand, it had evoked a reactionary domestic insurrec¬ 
tion and had burdened the Khanate with a crushing load of national 
debt—two portents of troubles that were to overtake Turkey likewise in 
her subsequent pilgrimage towards the same Western goal. 2 

In Turkey, Western military experts were employed by the Porte in 
the war with the Hapsburg Monarchy and Russia that broke out in a.d. 
1788 ; J but the first comprehensive attempt to remodel the Ottoman 
army and navy was not made till after the accession of Selim III in 
a.d. 1789 and the restoration of peace in a.d. 1792. The Ottoman Navy 
was reorganized by French hands; Selim’s new-model army, the Nizam- 
i-Jcdid, was inaugurated in 1793. 4 The tragic end of this enlightened 
experiment demonstrated that, in the political strategy of military 
Westernization in the Ottoman World, an indispensable opening move 
was to get rid of the classical regular army represented in Turkey by the 
Padishah’s Slave-Household and in Egypt by the Mamluks; for, while, 
by Selim Ill’s day, more than a century had passed since a Janissary 
Corps which had once been the best infantry in the World had ceased 
to be of any avail in war against the Ottoman Empire’s foreign enemies, 
the reformer-sultan’s fate showed that the Janissaries still held their own 
sovereign’s life in their hands and that the living generation had no more 
scruple than their seventeenth-century predecessors had had against 
murdering a Padishah when his policy seemed to them to threaten their 
vested interests. 

In the next act of the Ottoman drama, this lesson was taken to heart 
by Selim Ill’s cousin and all but immediate successor, Mahmud II, and 
in Egypt by Mehmed ‘AH. Mahmud managed to extirpate the Janissaries 
in a . d . 1826, eighteen years after he had been placed on his perilous 
throne, 5 and Mehmed 'All the Egyptian Mamluks in a.d. 1811, six years 
after he had contrived to be appointed Pasha of Egypt, 6 as Peter had 

* The eventual frustration of a sly Ottoman attempt to reacquire this suzerainty by 
reserving the Sultan’s jurisdiction over the Crimea in his capacity as Caliph has been 
noticed in VI. vii. 23, with n. 4. 

* See Jorga, N.: Geichichle del OsmartischenReiches (Gotha 1908-13, Perthes, 5 vols.), 



240 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
extirpated the Streltsy 1 in a.d. 1698-9, 2 ten years after his own advent to 
effective power; and, while Mehmcd ‘AH did not have to exercise such 
patience as Mahmud in waiting for his opportunity to put his drones to 
death, he did show extreme caution and tact in taking the steps by which 
he gradually built up a counterpart in Egypt of Selim Ill’s abortive 
Niz 3 m-i-Jedid. 

By the time of his elevation to the viceroyalty of Egypt in a.d. 1805, 
Mehmed ‘AH was in a position to profit by Egyptian experience during 
the four years that had passed since his second appearance on the scene 
in a.d. 1801 as an officer in the Ottoman expeditionary force which had 
arrived in Egypt in that year. 3 The French Army that had conquered 
Egypt in a.d. 1798 and occupied it thereafter during the years a.d. 1798- 
1801 had made a still deeper impression on the Muslim soldiers who had 
encountered them than had been made on the Porte by the Western- 
trained Russian army and navy that had defeated the Ottoman fighting 
forces in a.d. 1768-74. Even the Mamluks, in their lair in Upper Egypt, 
had attempted to driU their troops French-fashion; 4 the Mamluk war¬ 
lord Husayn Bey al-Afranji went so far as to raise a troop of Egyptian 
Christian soldiers, with French drums to keep them in step; 3 and 
Muhammad al-Alfi likewise had a unit of French-drilled troops, whose 
evolutions Mehmed ‘AH used, in a.d, 1806, to watch through field 
glasses. 6 The classically educated and conservative-minded qul Khosrev 

1 "The Streltsy, part palace guard, part standing army and police force, organised 
in twenty-two regiments, each about a thousand strong, and stationed mainly in Mos¬ 
cow. were more addicted to armed outbursts than fitted for serious military operation*. 
... They were a hereditary, privileged force, recruited for the most part from the towns¬ 
folk, partly engaged in trade and handicrafts, living apart in their own quarters, an in- 
citable hotbed of superstition, pride, reaction, and religious dissent' (Sumner: Peter the 
Great and the Emergence ojPussia, p. it). 

* See III. iii. 282, n. 1. While Peter had been absent from Russia on his Western tour 
of a.d. 1697-8, the Streltsy had tried to play the same trick as the Janissaries succeeded 
in playing on Selim III. Deserters from the Streltsy regiments stationed in the provinces 
had marched on Moscow with the programme of wiping out Peter's German partisans 
and dethroning the Tsar in favour of his elder sister Sophia, who had been in power as 
regent between the anti-Petrinc revolution of May 1682 (when Peter’s adherents had 
once already been massacred) and the pro-Petrine revolution of A.D. 1689. This Putsch 
was crushed by Peter’s Scottish right-hand-man Gordon before Peter had had time to 
return to Moscow from Vienna, where the news of the revolt had found him. On his 
return he took savage punitive measures against the rebels; the Streltsy Corps itself was 
disbanded; and the survivors were forbidden to bear arms (sec BriSckner, A.: Peter der 
Grosse (Berlin 1879, Grote), pp. 257-66). While Peter was justified, from his own stand¬ 
point, in destroying a long since useless corps which had tried to deprive him of his 
throne and would not have hesitated to take his life, the Streltsy, on their side, had had 
grounds for mistrusting Peter’s intentions towards them. Between his effective advent 
to power in a.d. 1689 and his two campaigns against the Ottoman fortress of Azov, he 
had advertised their incompetence by pitting them against his new Western-trained 
regiments in manoeuvres (BrOckner, op. cit., p. no); he was suspect of having used the 
two Azov campaigns of A.D. 1695 and A.D. 1696 as opportunities for decimating them 
(BrOckner, op. cit., p. 252), a* the Ottoman statesmen of the House of KbprtllO had been 
suspected of prolonging the War of Candia in order to reduce the numbers of the Janis¬ 
saries (sec III. iii. 49, n. 4); and, on the eve of his departure from Russia in A.D. 1697, 
he had banished them from Moscow (BrOckner, op. cit., p. 249). 

J Mehmed ‘AH had volunteered for service in Egypt in A.D. 1798, and had duly 
served in the first Turkish expeditionary force that had suffered disaster at Aboukir 
on the 25th July, 1799. 

* See Jabarti,Shaykh’Abd-ar-Rahmanal -:' Aja'ib-al-Athdrfi’t-Tarujimxva'l-Akhbar, 
French translation: Mtrveilles Biographizes et Histmiques (Cairo 1888-96, Imprimerie 
Nationale; Paris 1888-96, Leroux, 9 vols.), vol. vii, p. 128. Cp. vol. viii, p. 46. 

* See Jabarti, op. cit., vol. vii, p. 253. 

6 See Jabarti, op. cit., vol. viii, p. 46. 



THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 241 
Pasha, who was the first viceroy of Egypt under the restored Ottoman 
regime after the capitulation of the French in a.d. 1801, set to work next 
year to provide himself with the rudiments of a Niz 5 m-i-Jedid by re¬ 
cruiting Sudanese pilgrims en route through Egypt; dressing these in 
uniforms of a French cut; requisitioning black slaves from private 
owners; giving these, too, a military training; and also requisitioning 
white slaves, whom he equipped like Mamluks but placed under the 
command of French officers with a stiffening in the ranks of as many 
French deserters as he could enlist. 1 This experiment had as unhappy an 
ending as Khosrcv’s master Sultan Selim Ill’s; for, when Khosrev led his 
new-model army against the unpaid and consequently mutinous Albanian 
mercenary troops of the Ottoman army of reoccupation, he not only failed 
to dislodge the mutineers from the citadel of Cairo, but was driven by them 
out of the capital and barely succeeded in escaping from Egypt alive. 2 

These turbulent Albanian barbarians, who had arrived in Egypt in the 
Ottoman expeditionary force of a.d. 1801 with Mehmed 'All as their 
second in command, 3 required more delicate handling than the degener¬ 
ate Egyptian Mamluks and Janissaries. 4 * In a.d. 1806 Mehmed ‘All had 
to quell a mutiny of Albanian troops to whom he owed arrears of pay.* 
In a.d. 1813 he ventured with impunity to impose a fatigue of Western 
drill, twice a week, on the expeditionary force that was at that time in 
training for an assault upon the Wahhabis in the Hijaz; 6 but a more 
systematic attempt that he made in a.d. 1815 to impose not only Western 
drill but also Western uniforms on his Albanian and Turkish troops 
provoked a mutiny at Cairo 7 in the spirit of the tmeutes against Khan 
Shaliln Gir 3 y and Sultan Selim; Mehmed 'All could count himself 
fortunate in managing to bribe the mutineers into a return to discipline 8 
before he had suffered Selim’s fate; and this lesson taught the canny 
Rumeliot to outmanceuvrc his wild men instead of hazarding a second 
frontal attack on their susceptibilities. 

1 See Jnbarti, op. cit., vol. vii, p. na. 

1 See Jabarti, op. cit., vo!. vii, pp. 163 and 167. The Albanian mutineers pillaged 
Khosrev Pasha’s house in Cairo, but the Pasha's harem was defended by eighteen French 
soldiers in his service, who kept the mutineers out till all the women had been evacuated 
(ibid., p. 166). 

J Their commander, Tahir, was not only an Albanian himself but had little or no 
command of any language except his Albanian mother tongue. He frequented the 
[?Bektashi] dervishes in Cairo and attended their religious exercises (Jabarti, op. cit., 
vol. vii, p. iSt). A few weeks after he had driven Khosrev Pasha out of Cairo and out of 
Egypt, Tahir met his death in a clash between his Albanians and the Egyptian Janis¬ 
saries, and this left the way clear for his second-in-command, Mehmed ‘Ali, to make 
himself absolute master of Egypt in the course of the twenty years a.d. 1803-23 by suc¬ 
cessively playing off the Mamluks against the Janissaries, the 'Ulamfi against the Delis, 
and finally Joseph Sive’s French-trained Sudanese regular troops against the Albanians. 

* The Egyptian Janissaries were so degenerate by this date that Mehmed ‘Ali did not 
find it necessary to pay them the left-handed compliment of massacring them. Their 
spirit had already been broken by the humiliation of falling under the ascendancy of the 
Mamluks whom it was their hereditary duty to hold in check (sec IV. iv. 453-4). 

s See Jabarti, op. cit., vol. viii, pp. 17-18. 

* See Jabarti, op. cit., vol. ix, p. 11. The local representatives of the Western Powers 
were invited to watch these manoeuvres (ibid., p. 29). 

7 See Jabarti, op. cit., vol. ix, pp. 122-31; Clot-Bey, A. B.: Aperfu CMral sur VEgypte 
(Paris 1840, Fortin et Masson, 2 vols.), vol. i, p. Ixvii. 

* See Jabarti, op. cit., vol. ix, p. 131. Mehmed ‘Ali did succeed in the same year in 
persuading the commander and the rank-and-file of one regiment of Delis to wear the 
new Western uniforms (Jabarti, op. cit., vol. cit., p. 132). 



z 4 2 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

In a.d. 1819 Mehmcd ‘All hired an unemployed Napoleonic French 
soldier, Joseph S6vc; posted him at Asw 5 n, at the southern extremity of 
Upper Egypt, out of the Albanians’ sight and mind; 1 set him to work 
there on giving one thousand recruits a three years’ training; 1 persuaded 
him to become a nominal convert to Islam under the name of Suleyman; 3 
took a leaf out of his own unfortunate predecessor Khosrev Pasha’s book 
by going on, between January, 1823, and June, 1824, to furnish Sive with 
thirty thousand Sudanese negro slave-recruits who had been captured 
in the campaigns of conquest in the Upper Basin of the Nile that had 
been started in a.d. 1820; 4 and then gradually replaced these black 
troops by still more docile and far less expensive Egyptian peasant 
conscripts. 5 Pari passu with the formation of this new-model army in the 
Western style, Mehmcd ‘Ali disbanded his dangerous Albanian and 
Turkish irregular troops by such gradual stages that their sting was 
drawn before their eyes were opened to the ruse that the Pasha had been 
playing on them. 6 

Correspondingly acute difficulties were encountered and overcome by 
Sultan Mahmud II in building up his new-model army in Turkey—an 

1 Sec Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. i, p. Ixviii. 

* See Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 202. The core of this new-mode! army wasa body of 
three or four hundred young Mamluks who had saved their lives by capitulating and 
becoming Mehmcd ‘All's property (Vingtrinicr, A.: SoKman-Ptuha (Paris 1886, Firmin- 
Didot), p. 101). Sive succeeded in disciplining these turbulent and murderous troops by 
winning their devotion through showing himself completely fearless in face of an attempt 
to take his life on the parade-ground (ibid., pp. 102-4; Bowring, J.: Report on Egypt and 
Candia (London 1840, Clowes), p. 50). These reclaimed MamlQks provided a corps of 
officers for the new-model army when the rank-and-file was expanded by drafts of 
Sudanese negro slave-recruit* and Egyptian peasant conscript* (Clot-Bey, op. cit., 
vol. ii, p. 203). 

* Sec Vingtrinicr, op. cit., p. 105. Clot-Bey distinguished himself by refusing to 
apostatize (ibid., p. 105). 

4 See Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 203; Vingtrinicr, op. cit., pp. x 14 and 117. 

* See Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 204, and also Bowring, J.: Report on Egypt and 
Candia (London 1840, Clowes), p. 49, with the story, ibid., p. 50, of Colonel Sivc’s 
handling of his three hundred Maml uka. Mehmed ‘Ali’a original plan had been to 
recruit Negro slaves in order to avoid the necessity of conscripting Egyptian peasants, 
but this servile military material proved too expensive (Bowring, op. cit., p. 16). These 
Sudanese slave-recruits 'were strong and docile enough, submitted patiently to military 
discipline, and learnt their drill; but they refused to be kept alive* (Dodwell, H.: The 
Founder of Modern Egypt (Cambridge 1931, University Press), p. 64). According to a 
dispatch of the 8th February, 1824 (F.O. 78/126) from the British Consul-General in 
Ejtyph Henry Salt, cited by Dodwell, op. cit., p. 65, some 20,000 of them were thought 
to have been collected and sent up to Aswan by A.D. 1824, but in that year not 3,000 
remained alive. It was on the advice of the French Consul-General Drovetti that Mch- 
med ‘Ali had recourse to the conscription of Egyptian fall 3 hin as an alternative source 
of military man-power (according to Jabarti, op. cit., vol. ix, p. 82, 7,000 had been 
conscripted in a.d. 1S14 for the war against the Wahhabis in the Hijaz). About 30,000 
of these conscripts were sent to S*ve at Aswan. ‘Salt, who visited the training camp with 
Mehmed 'Ali in 1824, thought the Pasha had reason to be delighted with and proud of 
his new army’ (Dodwell, op. cit., p. 65). 


1803, was avenged by a successor of Khosrcv's who had been their second-in-command 
at that time. In a.d. 1823 six regiments of Mehmcd ‘Ali Pasha’s French-trained Sudan¬ 
ese regular troops made short work of the Albanian mutineers. After Sive had marched 
his twenty-five thousand new-model troops from Aswan to within four leagues of Cairo, 
the Albanians submitted to the choice, offered them by Mehmed 'Ali, of either entering 
the new regular army or leaving Egypt. The revolt of the Albanians against the employ¬ 
ment of French officers had been doubly dangerous because it had been accompanied 
by a revolt of the fallfihin against conscription; but, after the Albanians’ collapse, the 
falluhin, too, became submissive (Vingtrinicr, op. cit., pp. 123 and 127). 



THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 243 
enterprise on which he embarked on the 16th June, 1826, literally on 
the morrow of the destruction of the Janissaries. 1 The nucleus of his new 
force was provided by remnants of divers corps that had been created or 
reorganized on Western lines by Selim III; but the officers of these 
corps did not suffice for an expanded army in the Western style, even 
when they were reinforced by officers borrowed from Mehmed ‘All 
and by a few Western renegade officers for the cavalry, artillery, and 
engineers. 2 As for the rank-and-file, it had to be recruited by force in the 
teeth of conservative resistance. In Bosnia, Mahmud's local recruiting 
officer was mobbed, and the new Western-style uniforms were torn to 
pieces. 3 The pressed men had to be brought to barracks in chains and 
kept under guard after their arrival. 4 * The least unsatisfactory recruits 
were boys from the poorer classes of the Muslim community whose 
families had no traditional associations with the Janissaries, s and many 
of these boy recruits were not more than thirteen years old. 6 The privates 
were quicker in mastering Western drill than the high command was in 
mastering the Western art of war. 7 

When Mehmed 'All won a free hand, he carried through to completion 
his policy of Westernizing his armed forces. Under the general super¬ 
intendence of Colonel S6ve as Chief of Staff, 8 a training school for 
infantry officers, directed by a Piedmontese ci-devant Napoleonic 
officer, Bolognini, was opened at Damietta, 9 and an artillery school at 
Turah under a Portuguese director, Scguerra. 10 * A regular cavalry force 
was not organized till after Mehmed ‘All’s son, Ibrahim Pasha, had seen 
the French cavalry in the Morea," when they were replacing his own 
troops on the eve of his evacuation, under force majeure , after the des¬ 
truction of the Egyptian and Turkish fleets at Navarino by a combined 
Anglo-Franco-Russian naval force. Thereafter a cavalry school was 
opened at Gizah, in a palace formerly belonging to the Mamluk war-lord 
Murad Bey, under the direction of a French officer, Varin. 12 In the army 
as a whole, the contemporary French military organization was copied 
exactly (except that Turkish was retained as the language for the words 
of command). 13 The French system of discipline was introduced, and was 

1 See Bastelberger, J. M.: Die militdrischtn Ref omen unter Mahmud 11 , dem Reiter 

des Oimanuchen Reiehei (Gotha 1874. Perthes), pp. 109 and 128. 

* See Bastelberger, op. cit., pp. 127-9. In ‘he artillery the renegades were the only 

scientifically trained officers (ibid., p. 142). 

> See ibid., pp. 126-7. 4 See ibid., p. 134. 

* Sec ibid., pp. 126-7. 6 Sec ibid., pp. 127, » 39 . *nd J73. 

’ Sec ibid., pp. 139-40. The new Turkish, like the new Egyptian, army was governed 

by the French rigUnunU (ibid., p. 139). * Sec Bowring, op. cit., p. 49. 

9 See Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 204. 

See Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 207. 

'« Sec Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. i, p. Ixxxii, and vol. ii, p. 20s. In the new-mode! Turkish 
army the cavalry proved more difficult to train alia Franca than the infantry. The Turks 
particularly disliked the Western style of horsemanship. A Westernized Turkish cavalry 
was produced in the end thanks to the work of their Western instructors and to the per¬ 
sonal concern of Sultan Mahmud, who was particularly interested in this arm (Bastcl- 
berger, op. cit., pp. 129-30 and 141-2). 

,J See Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 206; cp. Bowring, op. cit., pp. 52-53. In Ibrihfm 
Pasha’s army of occupation in Syria, the cavalry were not so well drilled as the infantry, 
according to the British Consul-General in Egypt, Colonel Patrick Campbell, in a report 
on Syria in a.d. 1837. printed in J. Bowring's Report on the Commercial Statiitici of 
Syria, dated the 17th July, 1839 (London 1840, Clowes), p. 128. 

«J See Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 208. 



244 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
administered according to the French military penal code* (except that 
the traditional Egyptian punishment of the bastinado was not abolished ). 1 

The Egyptian new-model army was also made to march to French 
military music; 3 but in the psychologically significant and politically 
delicate matter of military dress Mchmed ‘All—taught by his unfortu¬ 
nate experience in a.d. 1815 4 —showed more prudence than Sultan 
Mahmud II in making a judicious compromise. Mahmud put his new- 
model army into a completely Western military costume from the neck 
downwards, and thereby brought into odium his entire programme of 
reform by identifying it in Muslim minds with hateful Western clothes 5 

1 A new-model navy was created for Mchmed 'Alt by French naval officers on parallel 
lines: 

‘The naval code adopted in Egypt is that of France, whose introduction must be 
traced to the number of French sea-officers who have entered the Egyptian Navy, and 
many of them obtained elevated command. Very essential services have indeed been 
rendered to the Egyptian Marine by French naval officers, especially by Ccrisy Bey, 
who had for many years charge of the arsenal at Alexandria, and Besson Bey, who was 
second in command in the Fleet’ (Bowring, J.: Report on Egypt and Candia, dated the 
27th March, 1839 (London 1840, Clowes), p. 54). 

Mehmed ‘Ali’s first-hand observation of the potency of sea-power in the campaigns 
in and around Egypt during the years a.d. 1799-1807 had made him alive to the value of 
a navy in the Modem Western style for a nineteenth-century ruler of Egypt, and he 
started work on building one up for himself in A.D. 1808, immediately after his repulse 
of the British invasion of Egypt in A.D. 1807 and seven years before his abortive first 
attempt in a.d. 1815-16 to create a new-model army. After buying Western warships 
at second hand, Mehmed ’Ali obtained in a.d. 182; the French Government’s permission 
to have two frigates and one brig built for him at Marseilles (Dodwell, op. cit., pp. 66 
and 223). ‘A little later he made a dock at Alexandria and began to build on his own 
account, employing French shipwrights to control the work’ (ibid.). His naval dockyard 
at Alexandria, on the other hand, was not started till A.D. 1828 (ibid.), when he was be¬ 
ginning to replace his original Western-model navy which he had lost at Navarino. 
A French expert from the naval dockyard at Toulon, Ccrisy, was put in charge of the 
dockyard at Alexandria in a.d. 1829 (ibid.). A line-of-battle ship of one hundred guns 
was launched on the 3rd January, 1811 (Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 222-5). B Y *•*>• 
1833 Mehmed ’Ali had 6 ships of the line, ranging in scale of armament from 84 to 110 
guns, and 7 frigates, and, by a.d. 1837, 8 ships of the line, with one more under construc¬ 
tion. The number of hands employed in the arsenal at Alexandria rose to over 3,000 
under the direction of 60 Westerners, and the naval school at Ras-al-Tin had a strength 
of 1,200 cadets (Dodwell, op. cit, p. 223). In a.d. 1839 Mehmed ‘Ali’s navy was still 
being managed for him by Frenchmen, but Mehmed Bey, who was the controller of the 
dockyard at that time, had been educated in England (Bowring; Report on Egypt and 
Candia, pp. 33 ~ 34 ). 

J See Clot-Bey, op. cit, p. 212; cp. Bowring, op. cit, pp. 52-3. 

J See Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 81. 

* See p. 241, above. In Egypt the style and cut of Frankish military uniforms had 
offended the aesthetic susceptibilities, not only of the Rumeliot soldiery who had been 
ordered to assume this alien garb, but also of the native Egyptian civilian spectators. 
Jabarti, for example, comments (in op. cit., vol. ix, p. 140) on the ugliness of the new 
uniforms, and laments, in this context, over the disappearance of a traditional decorum 
and good taste. 

s In the uniform of Mahmud’s Westernized Turkish Army by a.d. 1839 the loose 
native shalwar had been replaced by tight Western pantaloons for all ranks, while the 
officers had also been put into Western military frock-coats (Bastelberger, op. cit., pp. 
202-3). These affectations drew criticism from Mehmed ‘All’s son and right-hand-man 
IbrShim Pasha, who was the leading exponent of the rival Egyptian school of Ottoman 
Westemizcrs: 

The Porte have taken Civilisation by the wrong side. It is not by giving epaulettes 
and tight trousers to a nation that you begin the task of regeneration. Instead of begin¬ 
ning by their dress—and dress will never make a straight man of one who is lame— 
they should endeavour to enlighten the minds of their people. Look at us: we have 
schools of every description; we send our young men to be educated in Europe. We are 
also Turks, but we defer to the opinions of those who are capable of directing our own, 
whereas no regard is paid by the Porte to advice that is not their own. Their men would 
make very good soldiers, but their officers ... I The only man they had, capable of con¬ 
ducting their affairs, is the late Grand Vizier, Reshid Pasha. . . . You see the treatment 



THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 245 
—though, in deference to the sjTnbolic significance with which head- 
gear, above all other articles of dress, was traditionally charged in the 
Islamic World, he did draw the line at forcing a Western form of military 
hat on to his soldiers’ heads. In the army, as in the civil service, Mahmud 
effaced former invidious distinctions by replacing the studied diversity 
of the traditional Islamic headgear by the egalitarian uniformity of the 
non-Western fez , 1 but a hundred more years were to pass before 
Mahmud’s successor, Mustafa Kcmal Atatiirk, could venture in Turkey 
to impose upon all male Ottoman subjects the brimmed hat which, in 
Muslim eyes, was the Frankish gyaour’s characteristic mark of the beast . 1 
In the new-model Egyptian army, Mehmed 'All likewise abolished the 
turban , 3 and even went to the Petrine length of forbidding the wearing 
of beards ; 4 but the uniform which he devised for his troops was modelled, 
not on Western military uniforms, but on the more congenial contem- 

C orary dress of Rumeliot Turkish Muslim civilians . 3 All the same, 
lehmed 'All found it advisable to grant high rates of pay to senior 
officers, as an antidote to the repugnance which was aroused in Turkish 
souls by even the moderately Western style of the new-model army in 
Egypt . 6 

In Mahmud’s Turkish army the officers were paid less and the privates 
more . 7 In Egypt a Turkish officer enjoyed a rarity value, as the native 
Egyptians did not prove to make good officers , 8 while they did provide 
an abundant supply of conscript private soldiers. The Egyptian peasant 
conscript was perhaps better off in the Army than in his village . 9 The 
Egyptian troops were well fed 10 and were pronounced by a Western 
observer to fare no worse than their contemporary fellow soldiers in the 


which he experienced at their hands’ (Memorandum of M. Alexander Pisani’s report 
of his interview with Ibrahim Pasha at Kyutahiyeh, dated the 10th March, 1833 | 7 ), en¬ 
closed in F.O. 78/209, Canning to Palmerston, [#] 12,7th March, 1832, quoted in Bailey, 
F. E.: British Polity and the Turkish Reform Movement, A Study in Anglo-Turkish 
Relations, 1826-1853 (Cambridge. Mass. 1942, Harvard University Press), p. 172, 
n. 153). 

1 The non-Westcm origin of the fez, which was its merit in Muslim eyes, did not 
make it a specifically Islamic head-dress. It was an ancient Mediterranean article of 
apparel—identical with the Roman freedman’s pilleus—and it had been taken over by 
Arabic-speaking Mediterranean Muslims without ever having been abandoned by 
Greek-speaking Mediterranean Orthodox Christians. 

* Sec p. 237, above, and V. vi. 102-3. Among Egyptian Muslims in Mehmed 'All’s day 
the feeling against hats—and especially against hats with brims—was so strong that 
the expression ‘I will take the hat’ was used with the meaning 'I will stick at nothing’ 
(Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. i, p. 362). 

J The date of this negative revolution in Egyptian military headgear was about A.D. 
1823 (Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. i, p. 362). A hundred and twenty-four years later, the 
turban was still part of the full-dress uniform of the last British officers to serve in Indian 
cavalry regiments (see p. 228, n. 2, above). 

* See Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. i, p. 368. Beards were still highly prized by the Egyptian 
peasantry, and the story of a peasant conscript’s grievance sgainst a village headman 
{shaykh-al-balad) who had caused the conscript’s beard to be shaved will be found ibid., 
p. 369. 

J See Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. i, p. 363. No doubt the moral of an unwillingly con¬ 
scripted Egyptian fallah-soldier was raised by the exhilarating experience of finding 
himself clad in the dress of the imperial people with whom, in civil life, he could never 
have ventured to equate himself. 

6 Sec Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 211. 

1 See Bowring, J. : Report on the Commercial Statistics of Syria, dated the 17th July, 
1829 (London 1840, Clowes), p. 27. 

■ See Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 214. 

9 See Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. i, p. 248. 


•o See Clot-Bcv, op. cit., p. 209. 



246 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
West; 1 and their behaviour to their civilian fellow Egyptians (though 
not their behaviour to the foreign Arabic-speaking civilian population 
of Syria) was exemplary by contrast with the excesses of their predeces¬ 
sors the Mamluks, Janissaries, Dells, and Albanian mercenaries. 2 Broken 
in to Western military discipline and led by Rumcliot Turkish and 
Albanian commanders, they developed a martial spirit, 3 of which they 
gave proof in the Morea in a.d 1825, when they broke the resistance of 
insurgent Greek highlanders who were still formidable even after they 
had turned their arms against one another, and at Nisib on the 24th 
June, 1839, which was perhaps the first occasion since the Battle of 
Kadesh (comtnissum circa 1288 b.c.) in which the peasantry' of the Lower 
Nile Valley had defeated in the field the peasantry of the Anatolian 
Plateau. 4 This military service in Mehmcd ‘All’s army reawakened in 
Egyptian souls a national consciousness which had been stifled ever 
since the Primitive Arab Muslim conquerors of Egypt in the seventh 
century of the Christian Era had snatched out of Egyptian hands the 
political fruits of an eight-hundred-years-long Egyptian struggle against 
Hellenism. 5 

Though Mehmed ‘AH thus gave the first impulse to a latter-day 
Egyptian nationalist movement on a Modern Western pattern, 6 and, at 
the height of his power in the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, 
was in direct or indirect control of all the Arab countries east of Cyrenaica 
and west of ‘Iraq and the Hadhramawt, over an area extending from the 
Libyan desert to the Persian Gulf, this Rumcliot Turk 7 was neither an 

* See Bowring, J.: Report on Egypt and Candia, dated the 27th March, 1839 (London 
1840, Clowe*), p. 52. 

1 See Dodwcll, op. cit., pp. 22S and 256. 

5 See Clot-Bey, op. cit., voL ii, p. 212. 

* An afterwards eminent Prussian officer who was a spectator of the Battle of Nisib 
from the Turkish side formed a low opinion of both the belligerent armies. ‘Hafiz 
Pasha’s army', writes Hellmuth von Moltke {Brie/e Ober Zustdr.de und Begebenheiten in 
der TCrkci (Berlin 1841, Mittler), pp. 405-6). ‘was undoubtedly the best trained, best 
disciplined and best practised army, and at the same time the army with the worst moral, 
that the Porte had ever put into the field.’ In the campaign of a.d. 1829 the Qdniyeh 
and Qaysari corps remained passive and thereby allowed IbrShim Pasha to withdraw 
his garrisons from Cilicia and concentrate them on the battlefield (ibid., p. 384); and, 
immediately after the rout of the Turkish army at Nisib, the retreating Turkish regular 
troops were attacked by their Kurdish fellow soldiers (ibid., p. 397), who had been 
kidnapped to make good the losses in the Turkish ranks and who had had to be treated 
like prisoners of war by their Turkish officers, with whom these non-Turkish-sneaking 
recruits were unable to communicate (ibid., pp. 382-3). While the new-model Western- 
trained Turkish regulars were melting away, the old-fashioned feudal cavalry ( sipdhls ) 
held together (ibid., p. 398). The moral of Ibrahim’s Egyptian regulars was equally low 
(ibid., p. 283). Two Egyptian battalions deserted to the Turks on the very day of the 
Turkish defeat (ibid., p. 398). Nevertheless, Ibrahim won the day—though he could 
muster hardly more than half the Turkish army’s strength—thanks to his superiority 
in artillery and in ability to manoeuvre (ibid., p. 382). 

5 The anti-Macedonian Egyptian nationalist movement of the second century B.c., 
like the anti-Turkish Egyptian nationalist movement of the nineteenth century of the 
Christian Era, was brought to life by the military prowess of a native Egyptian new-model 
army raised and trained by alien rulers (sec V. v. 68). 

6 According to Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 468-9, the Arabs already hated the 
Ottoman domination. 

’ Mehmcd ‘All was born in a.d. i 769 at Kavila (KafidXa, the phonetic equivalent of the 
Attic Greek word xo{>a\f) in the Macedonian dialect of Ancient Greek), the port of the 
Eastern Macedonian tobacco-growing plains watered by the lower course of the River 
Struma (Strymon) and by its right-bank affluent the Anghista (Angitfis). In the four¬ 
teenth century of the Christian Era the city of Serrhes (Siris) in the Struma plain had 
become a stronghold, first of the Serb and then of the ‘Osmanli conquerors of the 



THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 247 
Egyptian nor a Pan-Arab nationalist; 1 he was an Ottoman patriot whose 
ambition was, not to destroy the Ottoman Empire by carving out of its 
Arab provinces a successor-state for himself and his heirs, but to re¬ 
juvenate the Ottoman Empire 2 by a process of Westernization which was 
to be achieved through a fruitful marriage of his own genius with the 
economic resources of Egypt. If his march on Constantinople had not 
been halted by the intervention of Russia in a.d. 1833 and of Russia, 
Great Britain, the Hapsburg Monarchy, and Prussia in a.d. 1839, he 
might have become the Shogun of a Westernizing Ottoman Empire in 
which an efficiently managed Egypt would have served, as it had once 
served in Augustus’s Roman Empire, to provide an enlightened dictator 
with the material means for carrying out his policy. 3 In an Ottoman 
Empire under Mehmed ‘AH’s administration, the rehabilitation of this 
derelict cldorado in the Nile Valley might have offset the loss, in a.d. 
1774, of a still undeveloped eldorado in the Great Western Bay of the 
Eurasian Steppe, as Carthage had been compensated for the loss of her 
Sicilian dominion in the First Romano-Carthaginian War by Hamilcar 
Barca’s acquisition for her of a greater empire in the Iberian Peninsula. 

Unhappily, not only for Mehmed ‘All’s personal ambitions, but for 
the interests of the Islamic World, the Rumeliot viceroy of Egypt, like 
the Barcide viceroy of Spain, was thwarted by the jealousy of lesser men 4 
in the capital of the tottering empire whose fortunes he was effectively 
retrieving by constructive labours far afield; and an alliance between 
Mehmed ‘All’s personal rivals at Constantinople and a concert of foreign 
Powers who had combined to frustrate the Levantine ambitions of his 
patroness France proved a more effective force, in the international crisis 
of a.d. 1839, than the public feeling in Turkey, and in the Islamic World 
at large, in Mehmed ‘All’s favour. 5 

derelict European province* of an East Roman Empire that had been shattered by Western 
Christian military adventurer* in a.d. 1204. The fertile district* of Serrhe* and Drama 
had been planted thickly with 'Osmanli settlers by Sultan MurSd I; and Mehmed ‘Ali, 
with his blond hair and beard and light chestnut-coloured eyes (Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. 
i, p. lxxv), might well have been a *cion of this stock, though, according to one account 
of his ancestry, hi* family were recent arrivals in Macedonia from Anatolia and were of 
Albanian origin. Mehmed 'Ali himself had started life in the local tobacco trade (Clot- 
Bey, op. cit., vol. i, p. lix) before enlisting as a volunteer in the Ottoman expeditionary 
force that was sent to Egypt in a.d. 1799. Mehmed 'Ali'* first wife, who, like her husband, 
was a Rumeliot, is said to have influenced him (Bowring, op. cit., p. 148). 

1 According to Prokesch-Osten, Count A.: Mehmed Aly, Vixektnig ton Aegypten, 
aus meinem Tagtbuche, 1826-1841 (Vienna 1877, Br*umailcr), PP- 62-03, Mehmed 'Ali 
did not want to found an Arab empire, though in such an enterprise he would have had 
the support of Arab public feeling (cp. Bowring, Report on Eg)pt and Candia , p. 7). 

* This is the opinion of A. B. Clot, the French director of Mehmed ‘All’s army 
medical service (Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 476), snd also of a contemporary Austrian 
diplomatic observer, Count A. Prokesch-Osten (see op. cit., pp. 15 and 120). 

3 See pp. 696-8, below. 

4 Mehmed 'Ali’s arch-enemies at Constantinople in the crisis of A.D. 1839-41 were 
the conservative Grand Vizier Khosrcv Pasha, who was not only opposed on principle 
to Mehmed ‘Ali’s policy of Westernization but bore him a personal grudge for his share 
in Khosrev’s humiliating expulsion from Egypt in a.d. 1803, and a rival Westernizer in 
the person of the French-educated Reslud Pasha, who was transferred from the Otto¬ 
man Embassy in Paris to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at Constantinople on the 24th 
January, 1838, by the Khosrcv whom heafterwards supplanted (Prokesch-Osten, op. cit., 
pp. 70 and 134). 

5 On this point, Prokesch-Osten’a testimony deserves consideration, though it must 
be discounted to some extent in view of this witness’s personal bias as an advocate (op. 
cit., p. 105) of the policy of working for a reconciliation between Mehmed ‘Ali and Sultan 



248 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
By the fiat of the Powers, Mehmed ‘All was confined, in the settlement 
of a.d. 1840-1, to the governorship of the Ottoman possessions in the 
Nile Valley; 1 yet, though the Ottoman World was thus disappointed of 
its hopes of political reunion under the auspices of a man of genius, it 
had at least escaped the complete dissolution that had threatened it in and 
after a.d. 1774; 2 and the imposition of peace in a.d. 1840-1 at the cost of 
a permanent political division between Turkey and Egypt did relieve the 
crushing pressure of an armed truce under which the two Ottoman 
Powers had been keeping costly Westernized armies mobilized on a 
remote frontier for six years (a.d. 1833-9) since the Turco-Egyptian 
War of a.d. 1831-3 . 3 The security of Turkey was increased by the terms 
of a protocol of the 13th July, 1841, in which all the Great Powers of the 
day agreed with Turkey that the Straits between the Aegean and the 
Black Sea should be closed to non-Turkish warships of all flags in peace¬ 
time. Thereafter, in the Crimean War (gerebatur a.d. 1853-6), Turkey 
had France, Great Britain, and Sardinia for her allies, instead of having 

Mahmud II’s successor Sultan ‘Abd-al-Mcjid (imprrabat a.d. 1839-61). According 
to Prokcsch-Oaten, Mehmed ‘AH was a convinced Muslim (p. 15); he reckoned, in 
the crisis of A.D. 1839, that Muslim opinion would rally to his support because he had 
shown greater independence than had been shown by the Porte in dealing with the 
Franks (p. 80); and the hopes of the Muslim World were in fact centred on him (p. 121). 
Whatever may have been the feelings of the Islamic World at large, those of some of his 
Turkish fellow countrymen were made manifest in the action of the Turkish fleet, which, 
on the outbreak of war, sailed from the Bosphorus to Alexandria and placed itself at 
Mehmed 'Ali’s disposal. Prokesch-Osten reports that after the Turkish fleet’s arrival 
at Alexandria on the 17th July, 1839, Mehmed 'Ali gave the officers an address in which 
his theme was the need for fraternal unity among Muslims and the consequent duty of 
loyalty to Sultan 'Abd-al-Mcjid (p. 102). On the same occasion he is said to have ex- 

S ressed a wish to come to Constantinople in order to reorganize the Ottoman Empire 
>. 103). On the evidence of the same authority, Turkish public opinion in Constanti¬ 
nople in A.D. 1839 was overwhelmingly on the side of Mehmed 'Ali and against his ad¬ 
versary- the Grand Vizier Khosrev; and the partisans of the Viceroy of Egypt included 
the Sultan’s mother (pp. iu-ia). When Khosrev appealed for a second time to the 
Powers, other Turkish grandees were moved to indignation (pp. 117 and 119). 

1 The P&dishah’s two firmans of the 13th February, 1841, conferred the Pashalyq 
of Egypt on Mehmed 'Ali and his heirs (on terms that were strictly defined), and the 
governorship of Mehmed 'Ali’s own conquests in the Sudan on Mehmed 'Ali himself 
for life. 

* It has already been noticed, on pp. 230-41, above, that the portions of Dfir-al-IslSm 
that had come under non-Muslim rule between A.D. 1774 and A.D. 1952 were a remark¬ 
ably small fraction of the whole. The immediate threat to the Ottoman Empire's exis¬ 
tence on the morrow of the signature of the Russo-Turkish peace treaty of KtlchQk 
Qaynarja came from the pullulation of incipient parochial successor-states; and, among 
these, the states set up by militant outlying barbarians, such as the Montenegrins, the 
Serbs of the Shumadiya, the Maniots, the Kurds, and the Wahhabis, were less menacing 
than those set up in the metropolitan provinces by insubordinate Ottoman Muslim 
war-lords such as Pasvanoghlu of Viddin and 'Ali of Yannina in Rumelia, and the Qira 
'OsmUnoghlu and a host of lesser derc beys in an Anatolia whose Muslim Turkish 

S alation had never quite forgotten the days before the Ottoman conquest of the non- 
>man Turkish successor-state* of the Saljuqs (sec II. ii. 150-4). These Ottoman 
war-lords built up their power by hiring war-bands of Muslim barbarian mercenaries— 
Albanians, Bosniaks, and Maghribis—and they were a greater menace than the recal¬ 
citrant tribesmen in Rumelia, Arabia, and Kurdistan because there were no national 
limits to the war-lords’ capacity for territorial expansion at the expense of the authority 
of the Porte. By a.d. 1840-1 these internal dangers had been weathered by the Ottoman 
Empire at the cost of having been constrained to recognize the autonomy of Mehmed 
'All in the Nile Valley and of a Serbian principality in the Lower Morava Valley and the 
independence of a Kingdom of Greece within modest frontiers. The Turkish new-model 
army, inefficient though it still was had succeeded in reimposing the Porte’s authority 
on the Kurds, while the Wahhabis had been temporarily crushed by Mehmed ‘Ali on 
the Porte’s behalf (see IV. iv. 76-78). 

J This point is made by Moltke, op. cit., pp. 381 and 401. 



THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 249 
to fight Russia again single-handed, and in the ensuing peace-settlcmcnt 
of Paris she was formally admitted into the Western comity of nations. 


The Collapse in Turkey and Egypt at the Beginning of the Last Quarter of 
the Nineteenth Century 

Thus the dose of Westernization that had been administered by 
Ottoman statesmanship to Turkey and Egypt since a.d. 1774 had 
enabled both these Ottoman politics by the middle of the nineteenth 
century to surmount the crisis into which the Ottoman World had been 
plunged by the Russo-Turkish War that had broken out in a.d. 1768. 
Yet, towards the turn of the eighth and ninth decades of the nineteenth 
century, both Mahmud II’s Turkey and Mehmed ‘All’s Egypt col¬ 
lapsed. Why was it that, within twenty years of the signature of the 
Peace Treaty of Paris in a.d. 1856, both Turkey and Egypt had fallen 
into adversity again ? 

One cause of this simultaneous collapse of the two temporarily re¬ 
juvenated Ottoman Powers was the cumulative effect of a strain imposed 
by the maintenance of professional fighting forces on a Western pattern 
in a society whose life had not yet been Westernized through and through. 
The consequent increase in government expenditure was not balanced 
by any increase of a comparable order of magnitude in the national in¬ 
come through a Westernization of methods of economic production; so 
far from that, the productivity of the peasantry was reduced by the 
devastating effects on work, health, and morals of the introduction of the 
recently invented Modern Western institution of military conscription ; 1 
and in Egypt, where Mehmed ‘All had embarked on an ambitious pro¬ 
gramme of industrial as well as agricultural development that had not 
been emulated in Turkey by Sultan Mahmud, a chartered accountant’s 
balance sheet would probably have shown that these enterprises were 
running at a loss . 2 A growing gap between public expenditure and 


» See IV. iv. >50-2. 

* Arguments on both sides of the question whether Mehmed 'Ali’s attempt to in¬ 
dustrialize Egypt was justified economically arc set out by Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, 
pp. 278-9. The adverse judgements in Bowring’s report should perhaps be taken with a 
grain of salt in view of Prokesch-Osten’s insinuation (op. cit., pp. 82-83) that the British 
did not relish the competition of Egyptian manufactures with theirs in the markets of 
the Islamic World. Yet Bowring was probably correct in stating (op. cit., p. 15) that the 

S ipulation of Egypt was impoverished by the monopolies through which Mehmed 'Ali’s 
ovemment attempted to make its economic enterprises pay their way. He also states 
(op. cit., p. 29) that the cotton textile and other Egyptian governmental industries were 
compelled to sell their product to the consumer at an unremunerativc price in order to 
compete with imported Western goods which were free to enter Egypt subject to pay¬ 
ment of duty at the rate of 3 per cent, ad valorem (the maximum chargeable under the 
current terms of the Ottoman Capitulations). Bowring declares that the effective maxi¬ 
mum was still lower than this. If Bowring is correct on this point too, that would, of 
course, tell against Prokesch-Ostcn’s view that Egyptian industries were regarded, in 
British eyes, as a serious menace to British exports. All the same, we know for a fact 
that the British Government had in mind Mehmed ’Ali’s policy of state-promoted 
industrialization fortified by monopolies when it negotiated with the Porte the Anglo- 
Turkish commercial treaty of the 16th August, 1828, in which the maximum of 3 per 
cent, ad valorem for Ottoman import duties was confirmed. The terms of this treaty were, 
of course, applicable to all Ottoman territories, including Egypt: but the Egyptian, 
unlike the Turkish, Government managed to abandon its monopolies in form without 
ceasing to enjoy them in effect (see Moseley, P. E.: Russia* Diplomacy and the Opening 
of the Eastern Question in 1838 and 1830 (Cambridge, Mast., 1934, Harvard University 
Press), p. ior; Bailey, F. E.: British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement, A Study in 



250 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
revenue was momentarily bridged by the Turkish and Egyptian Govern¬ 
ments’ fatal discovery of the nineteenth-century Western money market. 
Loans contracted, with the light-hearted ness of ignorance, on exorbitant 
terms for non-reproductive purposes brought both governments to 
bankruptcy within two or three decades. 

A second cause of collapse was the burden of holding down territories 
in which a majority of the population was disaffected. Turkey had in¬ 
herited from her own past the problem of Rumclia; she had reimposed 
on herself the burden of Ottoman Kurdistan by re-establishing her 
authority there in a.d. 1835-50, 1 and the burden of the Asiatic Arab 
provinces by suppressing the 'Iraqi Mamluks in a.d. 1831 2 and by avail¬ 
ing herself of the support of four Great Powers to recover Syria from 
Mehmed 'All in a.d. 1840 and the Hijaz in a.d. 1845. As for Mehmed 
‘All, he had deliberately saddled Egypt with a new empire which was 
as intractable as it was unremunerative by overthrowing the Wahhabi 
Power in Arabia in a.d. 1810-18 and embarking on the conquest of the 
Sudan in a.d. 1820. Sultan Selim I, the Ottoman conqueror of Syria 
and Egypt in the heyday of Ottoman power, had never attempted this 
foolhardy feat of launching out on to the Afrasian Steppe; and, though 
Egypt was relieved of her Arabian commitment by the revolt of the 
Najd circa a.d. 1830 3 and the subsequent re-establishment of Turkey’s 
in place of Egypt’s suzerainty over the Hijaz, Mehmed ‘Ali’s successors 
at Cairo continued to push their southern and south-western frontiers 
forward into the heart of Africa till the Egyptian Government's Silesian 
representative Emin Pasha had carried the Egyptian flag to Uganda 
in a.d. 1877, four years before the whole house of cards was brought 
tumbling down in a.d. 1881-5 by the insurrection of the Sudanese 
Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad. 4 

The most serious of all these Ottoman problems of disaffected popula¬ 
tions was Turkey’s problem in Rumelia, where she had to deal, not, like 
Egypt in the Sudan, with Nomads and primitive peoples in an outlying 
hinterland, but with a subject Orthodox Christian majority geographi¬ 
cally intermingled with a dominant Turkish minority which had likewise 
been at home in Rumelia since the establishment of the Ottoman Empire 
in the fourteenth century of the Christian Era. 

After the turn of the tide in a.d. 1683 ' n the perennial warfare between 
the ‘Osmanlis and the Western Powers, the destinies of the Ottoman 
Empire depended above all on the ability of the Turkish ‘ascendancy’ in 
Rumclia to conciliate its Orthodox Christian fellow countrymen and 
fellow subjects of the Porte. The Orthodox Christian peoples’ greater 
dislike for Frankish than for Ottoman rule had made the Ottoman 
Empire’s fortune in the days of its rise, 5 and, now that it had passed its 
zenith, its decline might at least have been retarded if Ottoman Orthodox 


Attglo-Turkish Relations, 1826-18S 3 (Cambridge, Mass., 1942, Harvard University 
Press}, p. 124, n. 109). 

1 Sec Longricg, S. H.: Four Centuries 0f Modem 'Iraq (Oxford 1925, Clarendon 
Press), pp. 284-8. 

1 See Loncrigg, op. cit., pp. 250-76. 

5 See V. w. 233, with n. 5. 

* See V. v. 295, with n. 1. 


* See pp. 151-2, above. 



THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 251 

Christians could have been induced to join with Ottoman Muslims in a 
common anti-Frankish front. 

On the morrow of the turn of the tide, the possibility of establishing 
some such common front was greater than at any later date, since at that 
time the Modern West was only just beginning to exert its attraction on 
Ottoman Orthodox Christian souls, 1 and the Grand Vizier Mustafa 
Kdprttlu was not slow in seeing and seizing this opportunity. In a.d. 
1691, only eight years after the Ottoman retreat from before the walls of 
Vienna and three years after the Hapsburg armies’ incursion into 
Kosovo, he promulgated the first charter of constitutional rights for the 
non-Muslim subjects of the Porte. But the Niz 3 m-i-Jcdid of a . d . 1691 
did not go far enough, even on paper, to rally the ra'iyeh with conviction 
to the support of their discomfited Ottoman masters, and, even as far 
as it went, it remained largely a dead letter owing to a decadent Imperial 
Government’s loss of effective control over the provinces. By the time 
when that control had been recovered in the course of the reign of Sultan 
Mahmud II (imperabat a.d. 1808-39), the price of the ra'iyeh'$ loyalty 
to the Porte had risen sharply. By that time the ra'iyeh had become 
hardened cultural converts to the secular civilization of the Modern 
West; this civilization had given birth to the political ideals of the year 
1789; and, in the Western World itself, the unifying ideal of Parliamen¬ 
tary Democracy had been pressed into the service of the disruptive ideal 
of Nationalism. 2 

Thus, in the nineteenth century of the Christian Era, the political 
atmosphere of a Modern Western World into which the ‘Osmanlis as 
well as their ra'iyeh were now being irresistibly attracted was less auspi¬ 
cious than it had been in the seventeenth century for an Ottoman 
attempt to win the ra'iyeh 's loyalty. A sincere, enlightened, and energetic 
attempt to attain this difficult objective was made, nevertheless, by the 
Ottoman ‘ascendancy’ during its years of grace between the settlement 
of the Egyptian question in a.d. 1841 and the outbreak, in a . d . 1875, j of 
a local revolt of the ra'iyeh in Bosnia which precipitated the break-up of 
the Ottoman Empire in Rumelia within the next three years. 

The monuments of constructive Ottoman statesmanship during this 
critical period are the Westernizing constitutional reforms—known 
collectively as the Tanzlmat—which were inaugurated by Sultan ‘Abd- 
al-Mejld’s promulgation of the Khatt-i-Sherif-i-Giilkhane on the 3rd 
November, 1839, 4 and were crowned by Sultan ‘Abd-al-Hamid II’s 
promulgation of a short-lived constitution on the 23rd December, 1876. 

» See pp. 161-5. above. * See IV. iv. 156-85. 

J The revolt in Bosnia in July 1875 had been preceded by two year* (a.d. 1873-5) 
of famine and financial collapse, so that the spell of political fine weather which had 
begun in A.D. 1841 virtually came to an end at the death of Melimed Emin ‘All Pasha 
in a.d. 1871. Sec Davison, Rodcric H.: Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856-1876 
(thesis submitted to Harvard University for the degree of Ph.D., lit April, 1941), p- 
298. (The author had kindly permitted the writer of this Study to read and cite a type¬ 
script copy of this work which was deposited in the library- of Harvard University. In 
May 1952 Dr. Davison’s book was in process of revision with a view to publication.) 

4 The Khatt of the 3rd November, 1839, "*3 reaffirmed in another Khait of the iSth 
February, 1856, which was incorporated in Article 9 of the Paris Peace Treaty of the 
30th March, 1856. The points of likeness and difference between these two charters 
are pointed out by Davison, op. cit., pp. 34 ~ 35 - 



252 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
Sultan Mahmud II’s life-work had been to rid the Ottoman Empire 
of the usurpers—Janissaries in the capital, dere beys in Anatolia and 
Rumelia, and tribal chiefs in Arabia, Kurdistan, and Albania—who had 
stridden into the political vacuum created by the decay of the Padishah’s 
Slave-Household since the later decades of the sixteenth century of the 
Christian Era. The immediate effect of Mahmud’s successful execution 
of this task had been a concentration in the Sultan's hands of an auto¬ 
cratic power which he had used mainly for Westernizing the Army, on 
the lines indicated above, to the neglect of corresponding reforms in the 
civilian sphere. The common aim of the liberal Westernizing Ottoman 
Turkish Muslim statesmen of the post-Mahmudian Age was to carry out 
Mahmud’s still unaccomplished work by converting the Ottoman 
Empire into a Rechtsstaat 1 whose subjects of all religions and nationali¬ 
ties would be secured so full a measure of equality before the law, accord¬ 
ing to the standards attained in the enlightened Western states of the 
day, that the ra'iyeh would lose their desire to secede for the purpose of 
founding or joining separate national states of their own. 

This policy was progressively put into effect by four eminent states¬ 
men in three successive stages. The author of the Khatt of a.d. 1839 was 
Mustafa Mchmed Reshid Pasha* (vivebat a.d. i8o2(?)-58), a critic of 
Sultan Mahmud who had gained his own experience in diplomacy—in 
London and Paris as well as at Kyutahiyeh and Constantinople—during 
the years a.d. 1833-9. 3 After the Crimean War ( gerebalur a.d. 1853-6), 
Reshld’s work was carried on by his two pupils and critics Mehmed 
Emin ‘All Pasha ( vivebat a.d. 1815-71) and Mehmed Kccheji-zadc 
Fu’ad Pasha (vivebat a.d. 1815-69)— a pair of Ottoman statesmen who 
were honourably distinguished by their exemplary cooperation with one 
another in practising the art of hastening slowly. Under the auspices of 
‘All and Fu’ad, Midhat Pasha (vivebat a.d. 1822-84) performed marvel¬ 
lous pioneer work in applying the ideals of the Tanzimat to the problems 
of Ottoman provincial administration; but, when, after the deaths of his 
pair of predecessors, Midhat took over their responsibilities at the centre 
of government, he failed to show their tact and judgement in grappling 
with a more formidable crisis in Ottoman affairs than they had ever been 
required to face. 

Midhat 4 was the son of an Ottoman official of Pomak origin 5 and per¬ 
haps also of BektashI proclivities. 6 He was born at Ruschuk and grew 
up at Lofcha (Loved), Viddin, and Constantinople. 7 He entered the 
Ottoman public service at the age of fourteen in a.d. 1836, 8 but found 

* Sec Bailey, op. cit., pp. 185-6. 

1 The Khatt of the 3rd November, 1839, was to a large extent a reproduction of a 
memorandum communicated by Reshid to Palmerston on the 12th August, 1839 
(Bailey, op. cit., pp. 185-6 and 271-6). 

1 Sec Bailey, op. cit., p. 181. 

* For Midhat’s career see Davison, op. cit.; Babingcr, Fr., s.v. 'Midhat Pasha’, in 

the Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. iii (Leyden 1936, Brill), pp. 481-2; (Antoine, Louis! 
'L6ou2on-!e-Duc’: Midhat Pacha (Paris 1877, Dentu); Midhat, ‘Ali Haydar (Midhat 
Pasha’a son): The Life of Midhat Pasha (London 1903. John Murray); eundem: Midhat 
Pasha: Hayat-i-Siyasiycsi, Khidmdti, Menfd HaySli (Constantinople, A. H. 1325 — a.d. 
1909, Hiial Pres*, 2 vols.). * See Davison, op. cit., p. 196. 

6 Sec Davison, op. cit., p. 197; Babmger, op. cit.. p. 481. 

7 Sec Babingcr, op. cit., loc. cit. * See Babinger, op. cit., loc. cit. 



THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 253 

an opportunity later in his career, in a.d. 1858, of spending six months 
in the West and visiting Vienna, Paris, Brussels, and London. 1 Midhat 
made his mark in the field of provincial administration, where Sultan 
Mahmud II had cleared the ground by sweeping away the host of local 
usurpers who had been on the verge of carving the Ottoman Empire into 
successor-states, but had left to his own heirs on the Ottoman imperial 
throne the task of building up a new system of local government, on 
Western lines, through which the Porte could exercise and maintain its 
recaptured authority over the Sultan’s hereditary dominions. In succes¬ 
sive tenures of provincial governorships in different quarters of the 
Ottoman Empire, including not only Rumelia but ‘Iraq, Midhat worked 
out, and applied with conspicuous personal success, a dual policy which 
was taken by the Porte as the basis for a general reorganization of Otto¬ 
man provincial administration. With one hand he took action to make 
the Ottoman regime not only tolerable but attractive to Ottoman subjects 
of all communities by fostering mixed provincial councils, 2 mixed 
schools, technical education, and public works, especially for the im¬ 
provement of communications. With the other hand he was equally 
vigorous in suppressing Panslavism and other forms of separatism and 
in maintaining law and order. 5 

Midhat came to the front in a.d. 1854, when he was entrusted with 
the task of restoring order in a Rumelia where repercussions of the 
Crimean War were making themselves felt among the Slav Orthodox 
Christian majority of the local population. 4 He distinguished himself 
there by his success in suppressing unrest and brigandage and in settling 
Circassian refugees from the Russian conquest of the North-Western 
Caucasus. 5 After returning to the Grand Council of the Empire at 
Constantinople, which he had already served as its Second Secretary, 
and winning the esteem of the representatives of Turkey’s allies, 6 he 
was appointed in a.d. 1857 to be governor of Viddin and Silistria; 7 and 
thereafter, after visiting Western Europe 8 and serving the Grand Council 
as its First Secretary, 9 he served during the years a.d. 1861—3 as governor 
of a special province comprising the three Rumelian districts of Nish, 
t)skiib, and Prizren 10 —a delicate task, since the Orthodox Christians in 
the local population were Serb fellow tribesmen of the people of the 
adjoining autonomous principality of Serbia and independent statelet of 
Montenegro. In this special province Midhat worked for the establish¬ 
ment of genuinely representative institutions of local self-government, 
for a just redistribution of taxation, and for material improvements that 
would benefit the inhabitants without distinction of religion or national¬ 
ity.” His success here led to his being commissioned to advise and assist 


* See Babinger, op. dt, loc. dt.; Davison, op. at, p. x 97 I Antoine, op. at, pp. 29 

and 2?' . 

- These had been envisaged in the Khatt of a.d. 1839 (Davison, op. at., pp. 27-28). 
1 See Davison, op. dt., pp. 198-20x. 

* See Babinger, op. dt, p. 481. 

* See Antoine, od. cit,.pp. 20-21.. 6 See ibid., p. 22. 

? See ibid., p. 26; Babinger, op. cit., p. 481. 

* See above. » Sec Antoine, op. cit., p. 30. 

«° See ibid., p. 30; Davison, op. dt, p. 189; Babinger, op. cit., p. 481. 

»* See Antoine, op. cit, pp. 32 - 34 - 



254 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
Fu’Sd and ‘All Pashas in the drafting of a standard law 1 to regulate the 
administration of provinces (vilayets) on the lines of his own practice, 2 
and then being appointed, in a.d. 1864, to apply this new law in another 
special province composed of the three Rumclian districts of Nish, 
Viddin, and Silistria. 3 In this province in three years (a.d. 1864-7) Mid¬ 
hat built 3,000 kilometres of roads, 1,400 bridges, and three polytechnics: 
one at Nish, one at Ruschuk, and one at Sofia. 4 

Since a.d. 1858, Midhat had had the advantage of knowing something 
of the West as well as Turkey at first hand, 5 and he was opposed to 
mechanical imitations not suited to local conditions. 6 Perhaps his chief 
strength was his courage in acting on his own initiative. 7 But his virtues, 
signal though they were, were pitted against formidable adverse forces. 
Though his policy of translating the classical Ottoman millet system 
into Modern Western terms was the most humane and enlightened pro¬ 
gramme that could have been devised for improving the lot of a mixed 
population of diverse creeds and nationalities, this aim did not appeal to 
the Rumcliot Orthodox Christians of his generation, whose hearts were 
already set on becoming citizens of national states of a type represented 
in embryo by the contemporary Kingdom of Greece and Principality of 
Serbia; and in these disruptive ambitions they were encouraged by 
Russia, who was eager to go on fishing in troubled Rumelian waters. 
Moreover, this attitude or the disaffected ra'iyeh and their foreign 
instigators was largely justified by an unwillingness on the part of the 
Muslim ‘ascendancy’ in Rumelia to waive its historic privileges, and on 
the part of the conservatives at the Porte to commit themselves sincerely 
and wholeheartedly to a policy of transforming the Ottoman Empire into 
a commonwealth genuinely guaranteeing full equality before the law, 
in the Modern Western sense of that ideal, to all its subjects without 
religious discrimination. 

The constitutional issue thus raised in nineteenth-century Turkey by 
the scandal of a traditional discrimination against a non-Muslim majority 
in the population of Rumelia gave rise to a corresponding issue within 
the bosom of the ruling community itself; for the Muslim, including the 
Turkish Muslim, subjects of the Porte, as well as the ra'iyeh, were 
sufferers from a misgovernment that had its root in the Ottoman practice 
of Islamic political theory. 8 As the point was put by Midhat Pasha 
himself: 

‘In the past our ruling idea was to satisfy Europe in Turkey in order 
to keep Turkey in Europe. To-day our aspirations and our labours to 
achieve reform spring from an impulse within ourselves, from thoughts 
that are our own, and from an activity that is native to our country.’ 9 

* This law of the Vilayets was promulgated in November 1864, and was revised in 
a.d. 1867 and a.d. 1870. By a.d. 1868 the whole of the Ottoman Empire except 'Iriq 
and the Yaman had been reorganized into provinces on the new pattern (Davison, op. 
cit., pp. 189-90, 203, and 206; Kramers, J. H., s.v. 'Tanzim&t [-i-Khayriych]', in the 
Encyclopaedia oj Itlam, vol. iv (Leyden 1934, Brill), p. 659). 

* Sec Antoine, op. cit., p. 35. J See ibid., p. 29. 

4 Sec ibid., p. 40. » See p. 253, above. 

* See Antoine, op. cit., p. 57. < » See ibid., p. 44. 

3 This point is emphasized by Davison in op. cit., p. v. 

9 Midhat Pasha, quoted by Antoine, op. cit., pp. 57-58. 


THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 


255 


Accordingly, the outbreak in a.d. 1875 of an insurrection of the Serb 
Orthodox Christians in Herzegovina, where there was acute tension 
between the local ra'iyeh and a local Muslim 'ascendancy' consisting of 
ex-Bogomil native Slav landlords, raised the question of constitutional 
government for Turkish Muslim Ottoman subjects as well as the ques¬ 
tion of political independence for Rumeliot Orthodox Christians still 
under Ottoman rule, and, when, in this crisis, Midhat, instead of being 
sent to Herzegovina by the Porte, was appointed in August 1875 t0 be > 
for the second time, Minister of Justice, he resigned in November 1875 
and went into opposition. He was marked out for becoming the leader 
of the ‘New 'Osmanlis’; 1 for in a.d. 1867 he had been recalled from his 
Danubian province to Constantinople 1 to be President of a new Imperial 
Council of State 3 (fungebatur a.d. 1868-9) ant *> since then, he had been 
governor of the provinces of Baghdad 4 (fungebatur a.d. 1869-72) and 
Salonica* (fungebatur October 1873-February 1874) and—for a spell of 
three months (1st August-i9th October, 1872)—Grand Vizier. 6 

In the movement for constitutional government on Western lines 
that was now coming to a head within the bosom of the Ottoman 
Turkish community, 7 an agitation was started on the 7th May, 1876, by 
the Muslim theological students (‘softas’) 8 in Constantinople, and during 

* The origins of the ‘New ‘Osmanlis’ (Tureici ‘Ycni ’Osmanlilar’, mistranslated into 
French as 'Jeunes Turcs’, according to Davison, op. cit., p. 277) are obscure (ibid., 
p. 279). The fathers of the movement were men of letters not employed in the Ottoman 
government service (pp. 217-18)—Ibrahim Shinisi (pp. 230-5), Nfimyq Kcmal fpp. 
235—41). Ziyfi (pp. 241-8), and the ‘Zcalot’-mindcd Central Asian Turk ‘Ali Su'avi (pp. 
250-2)—who were, all alike, independent publicists, language reformers, and patriots, 
but in other respects were very diverse (p. 253). Their first revolt was against the classical 
Ottoman Turkish literary style, which was remote from the living language of the day, 
but by a.d. 1865 they were already advocating constitutional government for Turkey 
in the Western style (p. 280), and in a.d. 1867 they joined with three pashas in publishing 
a criticism of the withdrawal of the Ottoman garrisons from Serbia and thereby incurred 
the displeasure of ‘Alt Pasha (pp. 21C-16 and 218). There was, indeed, an abortive con¬ 
spiracy in a.d. 1867 against 'All and Fu’fid’s regime (p. 282). In consequence, Namyq 
Kcmil, Ziyfi, and ‘Ali Su'avi had to flee to Paris, whither ShinSsi had preceded them 
in a.d. 1864 on a second visit (Shinfisi had been sent there for the first time in a.d. 
1843 at the age of seventeen by Sultan 'Abd-al-Mejid and had taken part there in the 
revolution of a.d. 1848 before coming home in a.d. 1851). The four 'New ‘Osmanli’ 
leaders were unable to return to Turkey till after the death of ‘Ali Pasha in A.D. i 87 ». 
Nfimyq Kcmfil was banished from Constantinople to Cyprus on account of the sensation 
created by the production, in a.d. 1873, of his patriotic play Vdtdn, yahud Silistert 
(pp. ? 92 - 6 ). . 

* See Antoine, op. cit., p. 74. 

1 This Council of State, which was created by dividing the existing Grand Council 
of the Empire (alias ‘Tanzimat Council’) into a Council of State and a High Court of 
Justice (sec Kramers, J. H., s.v. ‘Tanzimat [-i-Khayriych]’, in the Encyclopaedia of 
Islam, vol. iv (Leyden 1934, Brill), p. 657). "as duly organized on a model that was 
French except in one crucial point in which there was no analogy between the political 
circumstances in the France and in the Turkey of Midhat’s day. In the Turkey of a.d. 
1867 the seats on the Council had to be distributed between the different communities 
of which the population of the Ottoman Empire was composed, and the non-Muslim 
communities were flagrantly under-represented (according to Davison, op. cit., pp. 303- 
4, they were given 13 seats out of 50; according to Antoine, op. cit., p. 75, they were 
given 3 scats out of 16). 

* See Antoine, op. cit., pp. 80-8x. In his governorship of Baghdad, Midhat achieved 
results second only to those achieved by him in the Danube Province in a.d. 1864-7. 

s See ibid., p. 88. . , 4 See ibid., p. 88. 

’ The Turkish community had been alienated from the existing regime by the famine 
of a.d. 1873-4, which had been worst in the Turkish-inhabited areas of the Empire, 
e.g. in Central Anatolia (Davison, op. cit., pp. 401-2). 

3 Sec Davison, op. cit., pp. 432-31 Midhat, 'AH Haydar JMidhat Pasha s son]: The 
Life of Midhat Pasha (London 1903, John Murray), p. 8t. Since the extirpation of the 



256 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
the night of the 29th~3oth May the reigning sultan ‘Abd-al-‘AzIz was 
deposed on the strength of a fetvd (legal opinion) 1 rendered by the 
revolutionary clerics’ 2 leader Khayrallah, whose followers’ demonstra¬ 
tions on the ioth and nth May had prevailed upon the intimidated 
Sultan to appoint him Sheykh-el-IslSm (chief of the Islamic religious 
jurisconsults in the Ottoman Empire). From that date Midhat was 
virtually in power—though it was not till the 18th December, 1876, that 
he became Grand Vizier for the second time—and a constitution was 
duly promulgated by Sultan ‘Abd-al-‘Aziz’s second successor 3 Sultan 
‘Abd-al-Hamid on the 23rd December of the same year; but this 
gleam of light had no sooner shone out than it was eclipsed by a deluge 
of disasters. 

The Herzegovinian insurgents had been neither pacified nor sup¬ 
pressed; Montenegro and Serbia had gone to war with Turkey on their 
behalf; a conference of representatives of the Powers which had 
assembled in Constantinople to try to restore peace ignored the new 
Ottoman Constitution and failed to fulfil its own mission; the victory of 
Russia in a new Russo-Turkish war (gerebatur a.d. 1877-8) cut down 
the Ottoman dominions in Rumclia to a remnant that was no longer 
permanently tenable, even after the Great Bulgaria of the original Russo- 
Turkish peace treaty of San Stefano (pactum 3rd March, 1878) had been 
pared down and split in two by the terms of the revisionary peace treaty 
of Berlin {pactum 13th July, 1878); the administration of six sources of 
public revenue from indirect taxation was handed over by the Ottoman 
Government to an international council of foreign bondholders on the 
20th December, 1881; and, meanwhile, Sultan ‘Abd-al-Hamid had 
established his autocratic control over what remained of the Ottoman 
Empire’s territory and sovereignty by dismissing the undiplomatic 
constitutionalist Midhat Pasha from office on the 5th February, 1877, 
and suspending the constitution itself on the 14th February, 1878. 
After a cat-and-mouse persecution, the Ottoman protagonist of a 
Modern Western constitutionalism was tried and convicted in May 

Januaries in a.d. 1826 the softas had taken over the Janissaries’ traditional role of serving 
as the principal political ‘pressure group’ in the capital of the Empire. (In a sense, the 
'ClemS were the Janissaries’ heirs by right of conquest; for their secession from the 
camp of reaction to the camp of reform had been the decisive change in the Ottoman 
domestic political situation which had made it possible for Sultan MahmQd II to suc¬ 
ceed in an enterprise which had proved too difficult for hi* predecessor Sultan Selim III). 
In a.d. 1853 the softas had agitated for war against Russia, and in a.d. 1876 it was again 
their anti-Russian feeling that moved them to support the constitutionalists (Davison, 
op. cit., pp. 430 -ih They were brought into the constitutionalist camp by a leading 
'Slim, Khayrallah Efendi (ibid., p. 426). 

1 Sec Davison, op. cit., p. 436; Midhat, op. cit, p. 83. 

3 To minds attuned to Modem Western social and constitutional history, the spectacle 
of clerics taking the lead in a movement for political reform on liberal lines would per¬ 
haps be still more surprising than to see military officers playing this part. The liberalism 
of these nineteenth-century Ottoman 'khojas' had the same origin as the liberalism of 
their contemporaries in the Ottoman Army. Their profession required that they should 
be educated; and an education in the traditional Islamic theology and literature enlarged 
the mind, even though it did not lead so directly to Western 'dangerous thoughts’ as 
the technical education of the new-model Ottoman military officers. 

’ On the authority of another fetvd from the Sheykh-el-Islim, Khayrallah, ‘Abd-al- 
‘Aziz’s successor Murad V had been replaced in his turn, on the 31st August, 1876, 
on the ground that he was mentally deranged, by his astutely perverse-minded brother 
‘Abd-al-Hamid II. 



THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 257 
1881 on a preposterous charge of having murdered the deposed Sultan 
'Abd-al-'Aziz 1 and was banished to Ta’if in the Hijaz to be murdered 
there by ‘Abd-al-Hamld’s orders . 2 

Simultaneously, Egypt was overwhelmed by a comparable concatena¬ 
tion of catastrophes. In a.d. 1876 she paid the penalty for her rulers’ 
financial improvidence by forfeiting her financial autonomy to an inter¬ 
national Cause de la Dette, and in a.d. 1882 an Egyptian nationalist 
movement, whose programme was to rescue Egypt from the financial 
control of foreign creditors by bringing the incompetent Turkish auto¬ 
cracy of the Khedive under the constitutional control of the Egyptian 
people, was crushed by the armed intervention of a single foreign Power. 
The leader of the Egyptian nationalists, Ahmad ‘Ar 5 bl Pasha, suffered 
Midhat Pasha’s political fate of being dismissed from office, tried, con¬ 
victed, and sent into exile, 3 and the British expeditionary force remained 
in occupation in Egypt. Its presence there enabled the British Govern¬ 
ment to brin^ the finances—and, with them, the administration—of 
Egypt under its own paramount control, but did not avail to save the 
Sudan, south of Wadi Halfah, from being lost to Egypt through the 
insurrection of the Mahdi Muhammad Ahmad in a.d. 1881-5. 

It will be seen that the ingredients of the cup of wrath were the same 
for both Egypt and Turkey, but they were mixed in different brews which 
had diverse effects on the patients in the next chapters of their histories. 

In Turkey’s catastrophe the insurrection of a disaffected Rumeliot 
subject population was the occasion of the other tribulations, whereas 
in Egypt’s catastrophe the insurrection in the Sudan was their conse¬ 
quence. In Egypt the troubles began with the imposition of foreign 
financial control, whereas in Turkey a partial loss of financial sovereignty 
was the aftermath of insurrection and war. As for the Egyptian nationalist 
movement of which ‘Ar 5 bl Pasha was at least the nominal leader, it was 
comparable to the contemporary nationalist movements among the 
Rumeliot Orthodox Christians inasmuch as, like these, it was a revolt 
of a non-Turkish subject population against a local Turkish ‘ascendancy’. 
The revolt in Egypt was initiated by Arab officers of an Egyptian Army 
which was still officered predominantly by Turks and Albanians. At 
the same time, this movement headed by ‘ArabI at Cairo in a.d. 1882 
resembled the movement led by Midhat at Constantinople in a.d. 1876 
in expressing, not a will to secede, but a demand, emanating from the 
Muslim people of the country, for the replacement of an inefficient 
autocracy by a parliamentary constitutional regime of the contemporary 
Western pattern. 

The Failure of the Arabs to Respond to a Continuing Challenge of Western 
Aggression 

Both constitutional movements were suppressed; but their suppres¬ 
sion was accomplished by different means in the two cases, and this 

1 See Babinger, op. at., p. 482. 

* Babingcr, loc. cit.. gives the date of the crime as the 30th April, 1S83; other authori¬ 
ties give divers dates (c.g. the 8th May and the 8th Julv) in a.d. 1884. 

2 'Arab! was banished for life to Ceylon, but was allowed to return to Egypt in A.D. 
1901. 


K 


258 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
difference drove the two countries along divergent political courses. In 
Turkey the ‘New ‘Osmanlis’ were suppressed by Sultan 'Abd-al-Hamld 
without recourse to foreign aid, with the result that, for the next thirty- 
one years (a.d. 1877-1908), Turkey was under the yoke of a native auto¬ 
crat. In Egypt, ‘Ar§bi and his partisans were crushed by the armed 
intervention of a Western Power, with the result that for the next 
fifty-four years (a.d. 1882-1936) Egypt was under foreign military 
occupation. In other words, in this next chapter of Ottoman history 
Turkey went through China’s experience while Egypt went through 
India’s. Turkey, like China, preserved for herself the blessing of 
freedom to make her own mistakes at the price of having to endure the 
unmitigated consequences of them, whereas Egypt was afflicted with the 
blight of being managed, rehabilitated, and shielded by alien hands at 
the cost of being debarred, so long as this benevolently stifling unsought 
tutelage lasted, from learning through the suffering that had been found 
to be Man’s one effective school of practical wisdom. 

Thus Egypt had escaped from an uncongenial Turkish domination 
only to become a pawn on the chessboard of Western power politics. 
This nineteenth-century Egyptian experience was shared by other Arab 
countries outside the bounds of the desert and highland fastnesses of the 
Arabian Peninsula itself; and a retrospect of this chapter of these Arab 
countries’ history would lend colour to the view that their weakness had 
been ruthlessly exploited by Modern Western politicians to solve 
Western problems at the Arabs’ expense. 

France, for example, 1 had embarked in A.D. 1830 on the conquest of 
Algeria in compensation for the collapse of a Napoleonic Empire in 
Europe; in a.d. 1881 she had imposed a French protectorate on Tunisia, 
with Bismarck’s blessing, in compensation for her defeat in the Franco- 
German War of a.d. 1870-1; in a.d. 1907-12 she had proceeded, with 
Great Britain’s blessing, to impose a French protectorate on Morocco in 
compensation for her blunder, in a.d. 1882, in missing her opportunity 
to go into partnership with Great Britain in the occupation and control 
of Egypt; and in a.d. 1920 she had attacked and conquered Syria, with 
a mandate from the League of Nations, in compensation for having 
been attacked and all but conquered, herself, by Germany in the General 
War of a.d. 1914-18. Italy’s attack on the Ottoman Arab provinces in 
Libya in a.d. 1911, with the connivance of the other Great Powers, had 
likewise been delivered in compensation for the shortness of the measure 
which Italy had received in the partition of Tropical Africa between 
European Powers during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. 

On the same cynical principle of making the defenceless pay, the 
Zionists on the 14th May, 1948, had set up-a state of Israel in Palestine 
by force of arms in a war that had resulted in more than half a million 
Palestinian Arabs losing their homes, in compensation for atrocities 
committed against Jews in a.d. 1933-45, not > n the Levant, but in 
Europe, and not by Arabs, but by Germans. 2 The French in a.d. 1920 
could defend their act of aggression with a show of legality by exhibiting 

* See X. ix. ir. 

* See pp. 288-92, below—especially p. 290, nn. 1 and 3. 



THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 259 

a licence from the League of Nations to violate the rights of the Arab 
people of Syria because other members of the League were feeling 
sympathy with France over her sufferings at Germany’s hands in the 
First World War, and because Great Britain, in particular, was grate¬ 
ful to France for having taken the brunt of the German attack on the 
Western allies, was uneasy in her conscience over having exercised her 
option to leave unratified a treaty, guaranteeing France in Europe, which 
she had signed on the 28th June, 1919, and was anxious to obtain the 
acquiescence of France in British ambitions at the expense of the Arab 
peoples of Palestine and 'Ir 5 q. By a similar operation of psychological 
forces the Zionists obtained a retrospective condonation from the 
United Nations Organization for their violation of the rights of the 
Arab people of Palestine 1 because the Western World as a whole was 
feeling sympathy with the Jews over their sufferings at Germany’s 
hands during the Second World War and the six years preceding its out¬ 
break, and because Westerners were ashamed that such atrocities should 
have been committed by a Western nation. The United States and the 
Soviet Union in a.d. 1948, like Great Britain in 1920, had an additional 
motive for condoning an act of injustice against an Arab people. In a.d. 
1948 the United States and the Soviet Union were competing for Jewish 
goodwill in a 'cold war’ which by that time they were waging with one 
another, as the Allied and Associated Powers had been competing with 
Germany for Jewish goodwill in the First World War at the time when 
the British Government had issued the Balfour Declaration and the 
American, French, and Italian Governments had adhered to it. 

An impartial non-Wcstcrn observer’s verdict would assuredly have 
been that, however grievously the Western peoples might have "sinned 
against one another and against the Jewish stranger in their midst, and 
however desirable it might be that they should make atonement at their 
own expense, there was neither merit nor justice in their compensating 
their victims at the expense of innocent third parties. As against Zionist 
and Western aggressors, the Arabs had an unanswerable moral case; but, 
with the exception of the ex-Ottoman Maghribls, 2 they could be criti¬ 
cized for their improvidence in having severed their political connexion 
with their Turkish fellow subjects of an Ottoman Padishah when they 
were as impotent to defend themselves unaided against aggression as 
they had been proved to be by the uniform sequel in the histories of 
Egypt, Palestine, the Lebanon, Syria, and 'Iraq; and they could be 
blamed much more severely for their moral failure in not having taken 
any serious steps to put their own house in order when, in the next 
chapter of the story, they had become masters of their own house at last. 

1 This was the moral implication of the admission of the State of Israel to membership 
in the United Nations on the nth May, 1949, three days before the first anniversary of 
the Zionists’ original act of aggression. 

* The Moroccans had always consistently played a lone hand, but the Algerines, 
Tunisians, and Tripolitanians, whose local 'Osmanli rulers had virtually ignored the 
suzerainty of the Porte in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, had followed their 
rulers from a.d. 1830 onwards in seeking to strengthen their links with the Ottoman 
Empire as a safeguard against the danger of Western imperialism which had been sud¬ 
denly and startlingly brought to their attention by the French occupation of Algiers (see 
p. 230, above). 



260 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
This stricture applied in particular to Egypt after the British recogni¬ 
tion of her independence, subject only to four reservations, on the 28th 
February, 1922;' to ‘Ir 5 q after the coming into force of the Anglo-'Iraqt 
treaty of the 30th June, 1930, through the admission of ‘Iraq to member¬ 
ship in the League of Nations on the 3rd October, 1932; and to Syria 
and the Lebanon after the rendition by the French of their Levantine 
mandates on the 3rd January, 1944. From those dates onwards, the 
ruling class in the principal Arab countries had been substantially free 
to grapple with domestic problems—economic, social, and political— 
and its failure to address itself to this urgent task was a more grievous 
sin against the Arabic Society, and a more dangerous threat to its sur¬ 
vival, than the blackest deeds of alien aggressors. This internal weakness 
was the cause of the Arab League’s egregious failure in a.d. 1948-9 to 
hold its own on the battlefield, and even to maintain a united political 
front, against an infant Israeli state which, on paper, was outmatched 
in strength singly by each of the Arab states nominally banded together 
against it. The ‘displacement’ of the Arab population of the greater part 
of Palestine was an Arab calamity that was the consequence of a Jewish 
offence; the other Arab peoples’ impotence to save their Palestinian 
brethren from this fate was an Arab humiliation that the Arabs had 
brought upon themselves. 

The military and political weakness exhibited by the Arab states under 
this test was a reflection of their social rottenness; this underlying evil 
was the responsibility of the ruling class; and this class could not 
plausibly plead, as an excuse for their sin of omission, that the task of 
social salvage was beyond their strength, considering the results achieved 
by the efforts of their counterparts in Turkey in the same generation. In 
Turkey and the ex-Ottoman Arab countries the twentieth-century ruling 
class was the heir of one and the same social heritage; and the social 
transformation that had been accomplished in Turkey in the quarter of 
a century opening in a.d. 1923 set a standard for these Arab countries 
which was as peremptory as it was reasonable. What Turkey had 
managed to achieve in her poverty was not too much to expect of 
Egypt, with her wealth in cotton, or of ‘Iraq, with her wealth in oil; and 
the presence here of these material resources offering ways and means, 
which a Turkish statesmanship might have envied, for carrying out a 
programme of social reform made the perpetuation in these Arab 
countries of gross economic inequalities between an affluent minority 
and an indigent mass far more invidious and explosive than it would have 
been if their latent riches had not been discovered and tapped. The one 

E lea open to the ex-Ottoman Arab ruling class was that its moral had 
een atrophied by a long bout of Western tutelage; but, except perhaps 
in the case of Egypt, which had been under British occupation for 
fifty-four years, this plea was conclusively rebutted by chronology, since 

' In A.D. 1952—between the date in a.d. 1949 when this passage had been written 
and the date at which it was being revised in galley proof—a coup d'ilat had been made 
in Egypt by a group of military officers, headed by General Najib ( Gallo-Acgyptiaci 
Neguib). In the autumn of a.d. 1952 it was not yet possible to forecast the prospects 
of the radical and comprehens ve programme for national regeneration which had 
been launched in Egypt by this revolutionary new regime. 



THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 261 
all the states members of the Arab League that disputed the establish¬ 
ment of the state of Israel in a.d. 1948 were ex hypothesi then already 
independent, and none of these except Egypt had come under Western 
control before the final dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in the First 
World War (gerebatur a.d. 1914-18), so that none of them except Egypt 
had been under Western tutelage for a longer spell than a quarter of a 
century. 

The Failure of a Turkish Committee of Union and Progress to Maintain the 
Ottoman Empire 

In Turkey, as we have noted, the drama of Westernization ran into 
a third and a fourth act which had no parallel in contemporary Arab 
history. 

The third act opened in Turkey on the 22nd-24th July, 1908, when 
on three consecutive days a hitherto subterranean Committee of Union 
and Progress raised the standard of revolt against ‘Abd-al-Hamid’s 
autocracy in the Macedonian garrison town of Resna, proclaimed at 
Salonica the re-establishment of the constitution of a.d. 1876, and 
compelled Sultan ‘Abd-al-Hamld at Constantinople to ratify their 
revolutionary act. This attempt on the part of a second generation of 
'New ‘Osmanlis’ to save the Ottoman Empire’s existence by transform¬ 
ing it into a parliamentary constitutional state on a Western pattern was 
no more successful than the first; and this time it became manifest that 
the failure was due to an intrinsic flaw in the policy, for this time, when 
‘Abd-al-Hamid tried to repeat the counter-revolution which he had 
accomplished in a.d. 1877, he did not recover his autocratic power but 
forfeited his throne. From the deposition of‘Abd-al-Hamid in a.d. 1909 
to the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in a.d. 1918, the responsibility 
for Turkey’s fortunes was on the heads of the Unionists. 

The fatal weakness of the ‘New ‘Osmanlis’ programme was that, in a 
multi-national empire whose peoples had been captivated by the Western 
political ideal of Nationalism, ‘union’ and ‘progress’ were incompatible 
objectives; and, when the pressure of events forced the party into making 
a choice, they sacrificed an attainable progress to the forlorn hope of 
still saving an untenable union. A twentieth-century Ottoman Empire 
stood no better a chance than a twentieth-century Hapsburg Monarchy 
of being converted into a Switzerland writ large; and the fraternization 
between members of long discordant millets in the first moment of 
excitement and relief at a sudden unexpected release from the common 
yoke of ‘Abd-al-Hamid’s tyranny was proved by its brevity to be a 
political mirage. On second thoughts the members of the non-Muslim 
communities reverted to a disbelief, born of melancholy experience, in 
the possibility of their ever being admitted to any genuine equality under 
the Ottoman flag with their Turkish masters; and, even if they had been 
convinced that this miracle would come to pass, it may be doubted 
whether, when it came to the point, they would have been willing to 
sacrifice to an ideal of Ottoman fraternity their hopes of being eventually 
re-united with their already independent brethren in separate national 
states of their own. By a.d. 1908 these feelings had come to be shared 



262 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
with the non-Muslim Greek, Serb, Bulgar, and Armenian subjects of 
the Ottoman Empire by the non-Turkish Muslim Arabs, Albanians, 
and Kurds. In these circumstances the Empire could be held together 
only by force majeure, and, to hold it by force, an Hamidian tyranny 
would have to be reimposed by the Turks alone on all their non-Turkish 
fellow Ottomans, Muslims as well as Christians. 

Desperate though it was, this tour de force was nevertheless attempted 
by the Committee of Union and Progress, and a folly which cannot be 
condoned can at least be explained. 

In the first place the Ottoman Empire was still in being, and few 
imperial peoples had ever had the strength of mind, which the British 
were to show in a . d . 1947, to give up an untenable empire voluntarily 
without waiting for it to be wrested from them. The Committee of 
Union and Progress spent seven of their ten years of grace in waging 
ruinous wars against irresistible aggressors: a war with Italy ( gerebatur 
a.d. 1911—13) which failed to save Tnpolitania and Cyrcnaica; a war with 
the Balkan States ( gerebatur a . d . 1912-13) which failed to save anything 
in Rumclia beyond the western suburbs of Adrianople; and a war with 
the Powers of the Entente {gerebatur a . d . 1914-18) which dealt the 
Ottoman Empire its coup degrdee after having been wantonly undertaken 
in the ill-conceived hope that, with Germany’s aid, this military adven¬ 
ture might compensate Turkey for her losses in Rumelia by enabling 
her to recover Egypt and other ex-Ottoman Arab territories in Africa 
and to win territories inhabited by non-Ottoman Turkish peoples in 

the Russian Empire which had never been under Ottoman rule. 1 

A second reason why the Committee of Union and Progress sacrificed 
the national interests of the Turkish people in a losing battle to main¬ 
tain the Ottoman Empire was that the strength of the party was drawn 
from the Macedonian remnant of the Rumeliot Turkish ‘ascendancy’. The 
party headquarters were at Salonica; 2 the backing in the Army, which 
made the revolution of a . d . 1908 practicable, came from officers of the 
Macedonian garrison; and an anxiety for the preservation of Ottoman 
sovereignty over Macedonia determined the date of the pronunciamiento 
—for Tal'at’s and Enver’s revolution in a . d . 1908 was precipitated, like 
the abortive revolutions of Midhat Pasha at Constantinople in a . d . 1876 

» The Pan-Turanian idea (see p. ini, n. 2, above), which was taken up by ‘the Young 
Turks’ (as ‘the New ‘Osmanlis’ may be styled without inaccuracy in this context) during 
the Russo-Turkish war of a.d. 1914-18, and for which Enver Pasha eventually gave his 
life on a battlefield in Soviet Russian Central Asia, had originated as a jtu d'espnt in the 
mind of an imaginative French Consul-General at Salonica, who had coined a ‘Pan- 
Turanianism’ on the analogy of an already current ‘Pan-Germanism’ and ‘Pan-Slavism’ 
(see Cahun, L^on: Introduction d VHistoire de I'Asie (Paris 1896, Colin)). 

2 Salonica was well qualified for serving as a centre for a Westernizing Turkish 
political movement at this stage of Ottoman history. It was free from the incubus of 
the classical Ottoman regime which was still weighing heavily on Constantinople. It was 
the regional capital of the remnant of Rumelia, whose Turkish inhabitants were the 
most energetic and progressive element in the Turkish population of the Ottoman 
Empire. The Salonican Turks were linked, through the Dbnmc, with their Sephardi 
Jewish fellow townsmen, who had been kept in touch with the Modem Western World 
by their Spanish origin and their commercial interests (sec II. ii. 246-7). And, finally, 
Salonica, like Constantinople, had been linked up with Continental Western Europe by 
rail. The writer remembers the impression made on him, on his first visit to Salonica in 
June 1912, as his ship approached the quay, by the sight of Hungarian, Austrian, and 
German railway wagons standing there. 



THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 263 

and 'Ar 5 bi Pasha at Cairo in a.d. 1882, by a fear that the overthrow of a 
native autocracy might be anticipated by a foreign intervention to which 
Macedonia seemed to be more imminently exposed in a . d . 1908 than 
any other outlying part of the Ottoman Empire of that date. 

The Success of Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk in Creating a Turkish National 
State 

On the 23rd July, 1919, when Mustafa Kemal repeated at Erzerum 
the pronunciamiento made by Enver and Niazi at Resna on the 22nd July, 
1908, the prospects for Turkey appeared, on a superficial view, to have 
changed radically to her disadvantage. The Padishah whom a mutinous 
officer was defying in a . d . 1919 was not, like ‘Abd-al-Hamid, an autocrat 
fighting for his own hand; he was a puppet in the hands of a victorious 
coalition of foreign Powers which had just overthrown not only Turkey 
but her mighty ally Germany; and the spur which had goaded Mustafa 
Kemal into hoisting his revolutionary colours was not the menace of 
foreign aggression against an outlying territory where the Turkish 
element in the population was in a minority; it was the accomplished 
fact of a Greek invasion—sponsored by Great Britain, France, and the 
United States—of a predominantly Turkish Anatolia. As it turned out, 
however, these grim circumstances were so many blessings in disguise, 
since they inspired the Rumeliot leaders of a new Turkish Westernizing 
movement with the strength of mind at last to have the full courage of 
their convictions, and moved the mass of the Turkish people in Anatolia 
for the first time readily to follow a revolutionary westward lead as the 
only remaining chance of saving themselves from a now imminent 
threat of annihilation. This intellectual and emotional revolution fired 
a new-born Turkish nation to a high pitch of heroism and a degree of 
psychic and social malleability that proved more than a match for the 
adversities by which this spirit had been evoked. The heroism displayed 
itself in a decisive victory in a battle for national survival against 
apparently hopeless odds in the years a.d. 1919-22; the malleability in a 
still more hardly won success in a long-drawn-out struggle for national 
regeneration. 

The new ideas and aims of Mustafa Kem 3 l and his companions were 
proclaimed in a ‘National Pact’ that was adopted on the 28th January, 
1920, by the Ottoman Parliament at Constantinople. The key-note—and 
the strength—of the new policy was a resolve to abandon wild-goose 
chases and to concentrate on the whole-hearted pursuit of practicable 
objectives; and the ability to take this resolve was a priceless gain which 
the Turkish Nationalists owed to their ‘New ‘Osmanli’ predecessors’ 
staggering losses. To renounce the ambition of recovering sovereignty 
over ex-Ottoman territories inhabited by a majority of Arabs or a 
majority of Orthodox Christians that had already been lost by a.d. 1920 
was less difficult than it had been to abandon the will to retain sover¬ 
eignty over those territories while they were still, however precariously, 
in Turkey’s possession. To dismiss the Pan-Turanian dream of a 
compensatory empire to be carved out of Turkish territories in the 
Caucasus and Central Asia at Russia’s expense was likewise less difficult 



264 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
now that Turkey and Russia were no longer at war with one another but 
were companions in defeat, with the consequence in Russia that the 
fallen Tsardom had been replaced by a Communist regime which, like 
the Turkish National Movement in a.d. 1920, was a target of Western 
hostility and was accordingly disposed to make common cause with the 
Turkish Nationalists in their parallel struggle for existence. In this new 
situation the Turkish Nationalists resolutely turned away from a vision¬ 
ary Pan-Turanian future as well as from an irretrievable Ottoman past, 
and addressed themselves to the task of carving a Turkish national 
successor-state of the Ottoman Empire out of Ottoman territories with 
a Turkish majority in their population, with a view to building up the 
life of this new Turkish nation on completely Western foundations. 

It will be seen that this programme was a Turkish counterpart of 
programmes that the ex-Ottoman Orthodox Christian peoples had been 
carrying out by degrees for more than a hundred years past; and this 
likeness was not accidental; it was due to a deliberate adoption, by the 
leaders of the new Turkish National Movement, of a policy which, 
within their own lifetimes, had served their Orthodox Christian neigh¬ 
bours well at Turkey’s expense. This spectacle had made a vivid impres¬ 
sion on the imagination of the Turkish Nationalist leaders because they 
had seen it at close quarters; for the moving spirits in the Nationalist 
Movement were ex-Unionists who, like the moving spirits on the Com¬ 
mittee of Union and Progress during the years a.d. 1908-18, were 
Macedonian Turks. Mustafa Kemal—whose beard, if he had worn one, 
would have been as blond as Mchmcd ‘All’s- came from Salonica; 
Fethi came from Uskub; but, in and after a.d. 1919, these Rumcliot 
Turkish nationalists showed their mettle by refusing to allow their 
policy to be governed by a nostalgia for a Macedonian fatherland that 
Tal'at and Enver had failed to save. They eschewed the perversity of the 
Macedonian Turkish Unionists who had sacrificed Turkey in a vain 
attempt to save Macedonia, and the even greater perversity of the 
Macedonian Bulgar nationalist refugees who had sacrificed Bulgaria in 
a vain attempt to reconquer Macedonia from a Bulgarian base of opera¬ 
tions. Mustafa Kem 5 l and his Macedonian Turkish nationalist com¬ 
panions stoically turned their backs on a beloved Rumelian homeland, 
which had once been the heart of the Ottoman Empire, in order to 
bring to life a new Turkish nation in an outlandish Anatolia 1 whose 

* The strength and persistence of these Rumcliot Turkish exiles’ homesickness was 
borne in upon the writer of this Study on the i ith November, 1948, when, on the west 
bank of the River Jeyhun, in the lowlands of Cilicia, in the south-eastern comer of 
Anatolia, he was spending a day with the ex-Rumeliot Turkish owner and operator of 
an orange plantation. This alert, progressive, and sanguine-minded Cilician planter was 
justifiably proud of the wealth that his brother and he had conjured, within the past 
twenty-five years, out of ground that had been out of cultivation when it had been 
assigned to his family in compensation for the estates that they had forfeited in their 
native Thessaly as a result of the exchange of populations that had followed the Graeco- 
Turkish War of A.D. 1919-22. His heart was in the future of a new Westernizing 
Turkey-in-Asia, and he was particularly enthusiastic about the economic potentialities 
that he was doing so much personally to develop in his own new home in Cilicia. Yet, 
when the writer happened to mention that he had once visited Ycnishehr (Graeci 
Llrissa), his Cilician Turkish host’s family’s Thessalian native town, the forward-looking 
pioneer enthusiast for a new Turkey’s Cilician California was suddenly transformed into 
a backward-looking scion of a Rumcliot Ottoman Turkish Muslim ‘ascendancy’. He 



THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 265 

people—Turks and Muslims though they were—had been, not the 
Ottoman Turks’ fellow conquerors, but the fellow victims of a Rumeliot 
Ottoman Turkish ‘ascendancy's’ conquered Orthodox Christian subjects 
in Europe. 1 

Thus, in setting out to create a new Turkish national state in Anatolia, 
Mustafa Kemal and his companions were faithfully following the ex¬ 
ample of their Greek and Serb fellow Rumeliots who had founded a new 
Greek and new Serb national state in two outlying tracts of the Balkan 
Peninsula a hundred years earlier; and, in the same vein, they were using 
the Modern Western magic formula of Nationalism to conjure back into 
political consciousness a people that had been lying dormant for cen¬ 
turies under an Ottoman domination. In Anatolia the ground had been 
prepared for this by the imposition of military conscription on all male 
Muslim Ottoman subjects since the reign of Sultan Mahmud II ( impera - 
bat a.d. 1808-39); but of course Mahmud had had no more intention of 
fostering a Turkish nationalism than Mehmcd ‘All had had of fostering 
an Egyptian nationalism when he had introduced this Modern Western 
military institution into his dominions. 

In the fourth act of the drama in Turkey—an act which was not staged 
till a hundred and thirty years after the play had been opened there by the 
accession of Sultan Selim III—the Islamic World was the scene of an 
adventure in Westernization which, in the crucial points of audacity, 
speed, comprehensiveness, and wholeheartedness, could challenge 
comparison with Peter the Great’s work in Russia and with the Meiji 
Revolution in Japan. Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk saw that his first objective 
—which was to defeat the Greeks’ attempt to conquer by force of arms 
a vital part of the Turkish national patrimony in Anatolia—was no more 


began eagerly to inquire what the English traveller had thought of the landmarks of 
the Thessalian exile’s childhood in Yenishehr—first and foremost, the local mosques. 

1 The ‘Osmanlis, starting from the north-west corner of the Anatolian Plateau, had 
built up their power by north-westward conquests at the expense of Orthodox Christian 
principalities in the Balkan Peninsula before turning their arms south-eastward against 
Turkish principalities in Anatolia (see II. ii. 150-4); *«>d they had met with the more 
stubborn resistance from Turks who chafed under a yoke imposed by kinsmen and 
coreligionists still more restlessly than the Orthodox Christians repined at a, for them, 
alien Ottoman rule. After defeating at Nicopoiis in A.D. 1396 the Western Christian 
Crusaders who had come to his European Orthodox Christian victims’ aid, the Otto¬ 
man Sultan Bnyczid I had been defeated at Ankara in a.d. 1402 by his Anatolian Muslim 
Turkish victims’ Transoxanian Turkish Muslim champion TimOr. The dethroned Ana¬ 
tolian Turkish princes’ appeal to TimOr had been made by them, and entertained by 
him. in the name of a Pan-Turkish and Pan-Islamic solidarity against an Ottoman 
Turkish conqueror who had impiously ignored the bond of a common religion and 
nationality; and, though the Ottoman Empire managed to recover from an all but mortal 
blow struck by Central Asian Turkish hands, and succeeded in reimposing its yoke on 
Anatolian Turkish necks, the Ottoman Padishah’s Anatolian Turkish Muslim, like his 
Rumeliot Orthodox Christian, subjects remained disaffected at heart—as they showed 
on the religious plane by their readiness to fall away from the Sunni orthodoxy of their 
'Osmanli masters to the heresies of Sheykh Bcdr-ed-Din and Shah IsmS’il and Hajji 
Bektash (sec I. i. 365 and 382-3; IV. iv. 08-69; V.v. it: and 295; and V. v. 662-5)and 
on the political plane by the re-emergence of the long-suppressed Anatolian Turkish 
principalities in the form of emb^onic successor-states of the Ottoman Empire on 
the morrow of the Great Russo-Turkish War of a.d. 1768-74. On the eve of the 
repression of Bektashism by Sultan Mahmud II in A.D. 1826 (sec p. 267. n. 3, below), 
■there are estimated to have been seven million Bektashis in the Ottoman Empire, mostly 
in Anatolia (Birgc, J. K.: The Beklashi Order of Dervishes (London 1937. Luzac), p. 15). 
The ‘Alcvi peasantry of Anatolia had a consciousness of affinity with the Christians 
(ibid., p. 210). 

B 2SSS.vin K 2 



266 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
than a necessary military preliminary to a social and cultural enterprise, 
and that, if he were to allow an exhausted Turkish people to take a 
victory in the field as an excuse for resting on their oars, the extinction 
of Turkey would have been postponed without having been perman¬ 
ently averted. He therefore did not wait for a military decision in the 
Graeco-Turkish War of a.d. 1919-22 in choosing his moment for 
launching his Westernization programme. He launched it while the 
Turks were still fighting with their backs to the wall, and he followed up 
the return of peace without a pause by bending all the strength of his 
demonic will-power to the waging of a 'total war’ of social and cultural 
transformation. A Turk of that generation might have found it hard to 
say whether the military war-years a . d . 1911-22 or the cultural war-years 
a.d. 1922-8 were the more severe of these two ordeals. 

The range and speed of the campaign of Westernization in Turkey 
during the seven years opening with the year a.d. 1922 can be indicated 
by mentioning four revolutionary changes that were carried through 
within that brief span of time. Those seven years in Turkey saw the 
disestablishment of Islam and secularization of the national life; 1 the 
social emancipation of women; 2 the transfer of Turkey’s intellectual 
affiliations from the Islamic to the Western cultural tradition through 
the substitution of the Latin for the Arabic Alphabet as the medium for 
conveying the Ottoman Turkish language; 1 and the apprenticing of 
Turkish hands to the mysteries of a Modern Western technology, 
industry, and commerce. In this Study it would be out of proportion 
to embark on any detailed account of these changes in Turkey, or to 
attempt to give even a catalogue of the corresponding contemporary 
changes in other Islamic countries. We must content ourselves with 
taking a glance at the revolutions in the two fields of Religion and 
Economics. 

In Turkey and other Islamic countries in the second quarter of the 
twentieth century of the Christian Era, the psychological effects of the 
process of secularization were more disturbing than they had been in 
the Western World 250 years earlier, and this for two reasons. In the first 
place, in the Islamic World the change did not arise spontaneously from 
within but was forced upon the Islamic Society, with a vehemence 
proportionate to the obstinacy and pertinacity of the resistence to it, by 
the cumulative effects of an encounter with an alien civilization. In the 
second place, the change was not foreshadowed and facilitated in the 
Islamic World, as it had been in Western Christendom, by a traditional 
distinction between the institutions of Church and State and between 
a religious and a secular side of life. The texture of Islamic life was a 
seamless web in which it was hard to distinguish threads that could be 
labelled specifically ‘religious’ and still harder to pluck such threads out 
without tearing the whole fabric to pieces. 

For these two reasons the bouleversement caused by secularization in 

y See Toynbee, A. J.: Survey of International Affairs, 1925, vol. i (London 1927, 
Milford), pp. 1-81; Toynbee, A. J., and Boulter, V. M .-.Survey of International Affain, 
J928 (London 1929, Milford), pp. 206-13. 

* See Toynbee and Boulter, Surt'ey, r 9 2S , PP- 200-2. 

J See ibid., pp. 216-34, and the present Study, V. vi. 67-68. 



THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 267 

Islamic countries was extreme, and its most shattering effects were in the 
sphere of private life. The extrication of the Turkish state from the toils 
of Islam—revolutionary though this process of disestablishment was 1 2 * — 
did not create acute personal problems of the kind that were presented 
to the intelligentsia by the elimination of Islam from education, and to 
the peasantry by the suppression of Islamic religious orders in Turkey 
through three administrative decrees of the 2nd September, 1925. The 
religious and cultural life of the Turkish peasantry in Anatolia had 
drawn its nourishment from the affiliation of villages to dervish religious 
houses;* and the sudden spiritual vacuum which the suppression of the 
religious orders produced throughout the Anatolian country-side’ was 
not adequately filled by the gradual spread of primary education through 
the arduous process of building village schools and training village 
schoolmasters. 

As for the economic revolution, the Turkish Nationalists were con¬ 
fronted here with the double task of industrializing an agricultural 
country and employing as their instrument for accomplishing this revolu¬ 
tionary change a community that had previously lived aloof from 
precisely those activities that were the distinctive features of the 
Modern Western way of life. Under a millet system 4 that had articulated 
the population of the Ottoman Empire into geographically intermingled 
communities which, in Western terms, were a cross between nationali¬ 
ties and occupational groups, the members of the Muslim millet had 
been peasants, soldiers, clerics, and civil servants, but had left it to the 
members of the Orthodox Christian, the Gregorian Monophysitc 
Christian, and the Jewish millet to supply the requisite complement of 
shopkeepers, merchants, and artisans; and the lines of this established 
division of labour had still been followed in the earlier stages of the 
process of Westernization. The pursuit of an exotic Frankish technology 
had been left to the ra'iyeh, while a Muslim intelligentsia had concen¬ 
trated its efforts on mastering the Modern Western arts of war, medicine, 
law, and administration. Hence in a.d. 1922, when all but a fraction of 
the Greek and Armenian minority in Turkey fled the country and was 
eventually replaced by Turks expatriated from ex-Ottoman territories 
in Rumelia, Turkey found herself suddenly deprived, by her own voli¬ 
tion, of the inadequate force of native Western-trained technicians that 
she had hitherto possessed 5 —and this at a moment when her nationalist 

1 The successive abolitions of the Sultanate and the Caliphate in Turkey have been 
noticed in this Study in VI. vii. 24-25. Some account of subsequent measures by which the 
process was carried to completion in Turkey between the years a.d. 1924 and a.d. 1928 
will he found in Toynbee and Boulter, Survey of International Affairs , 1928, pp. 206-8. 

2 For the importance of this network of relations, see Birgc, J. K.: The Btktashi Order 
of Dervishes (London 1937, Luzac), esp. pp. S 7 - 58, p. 64, n. 4, and pp. 211-12. 

’ The first blow at the religious orders had been struck by Sultan Mahmfld II. After 
his destruction of the Janissaries in A.p. 1826, he started a general inquisition into, and 
proscription of, the Bektaahi Order, with which the Janissary Corps, as well as the Ana¬ 
tolian peasantry, had been affiliated (Birgc, op. cit., p. 77). Bektashism survived under¬ 
ground; began to publish literature openly in A.D. 1869, in the liberal atmosphere 
created by the ‘New 'Osmanli' movement; went underground again under the auto¬ 
cratic regime of ‘Abd-al-Hamld (a.d. 1877-1908); and came out into the open again 
between a.d. 1908 and a.d. 1925 (Birgc, op. cit., pp. 78-81). 

4 Sec pp. 184-6, above. 

* In Smyrna in April 1923, on the morrow of the catastrophe which had precipitated 


268 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

leaders were giving the word for a forced march towards the ambitious 
goal of a thorough-going Westernization of Turkish economic life. 

Mustafa Kemal met this crisis by the ‘kill-or-cure’ expedient of 
teaching the child to swim by throwing it into water where it was out 
of its depth, and there was perhaps no department of his all-embracing 
programme of Westernization in which the value and efficacity of the 
Rumeliot dictator’s personal driving-force were more signally vindi¬ 
cated by the experience of the next quarter of a century. In the autumn 
of a . d . 1948, when the Republic of Turkey was celebrating the twenty- 
fifth anniversary of its establishment on the 29th October, 1923, the 
Turkish people’s success in acquiring the technical keys to Modern 
Western Man’s material power could be measured most pertinently by 
the extent to which the simplest forms of characteristically Modern 
Western skill had become familiar to the masses. Statistics of mechanics 
and foremen were more significant in this context than statistics of 
engineers and managers ; and, on this test, the Turks in a.d. 1952 had no 
reason to be dissatisfied with their achievement so long as they were 
comparing it with their own past deficiency in this field and not with 
the target set them, for their future exertions, by the contemporary 
achievements of the Soviet Union and the Western World. 1 

Russia's Competition with the West for an Ascendancy over the Islamic 
World 

The whole-heartedness and effectiveness of the Westernizing move¬ 
ment in Turkey in its fourth bout might, in itself, have been taken as pre¬ 
sumptive evidence that, by the middle of the twentieth century of the 
Christian Era, the Western way of life had made permanent converts, 
not only of the Ottoman Turks, but of all other Muslim peoples, apart 
from a minority—amounting perhaps to 25 million out of a total of 
probably more than 250 million Muslims alive at this time 2 —who, 
willy nilly, were then following the Communist way of life as citizens 

b wholesale exodus from Turkey of the Greek and Armenian ra’fyth, the writer of this 
Study had successive interviews with the managers of the two railways of which Smyrna 
was the terminus, and was informed by each of his interlocutors that, at the moment of 
the catastrophe, he had lost overnight 90 per cent, of his personnel and had had to keep 
his trains running, as best he could, with an intake, all in one moment, of that over¬ 
whelmingly high percentage of unskilled labour. The explanation was that these two 
railways in Turkey had been built, owned, and managed by a French and a British 
private company, and had each recruited almost the whole of its staff, apart from a tiny 
Frankish contingent, from non-Turkish natives of the country’. The sudden exodus of 
the rai'yeh thus put these two railways in a quandary from which they might have failed 
to extricate themselves if they had not been assisted by the military engineers of the 
Turkish Anny—whose technical training was the outstanding exception to the rule, 
still prevailing at the time, that to be a Turk and a Muslim was synonymous with being 
innocent of all acquaintance with Modern Western technique. 

1 The writer and his wife spent the month of November 1948 in Turkey as guests of 
the Turkish Government, and during a week out of this month they were travelling by 
road from Ankara to Adana via Yozgat, Chorum, Merzifun, Amasiyeh, Toqat, Sivas, 
Qayaari, and Nijjdeh. They were impressed by the number and resourcefulness of the 
lorry-drivers whom they passed on the road, and by the keenness of both the instructors 
and the pupils at the provincial polytechnic at Nigdch. If Midhat Pasha could have 
returned to life to see that sight, he would assuredly have felt that his own life-work 
had not been in vain. 

* The total Muslim population of the World was estimated to have been 24a millions 
in a.d. 1929 according to Massignon, L.: Annuaire du Monde Mutulman, 3rd ed. (Paris 
1930, Leroux), pp. 479-S0. 



THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 269 

of the Soviet Union. Though the Ottoman Turks were now truculently 
reckoning themselves as Europeans and dissociating their country from 
the Middle East, their fellow Muslims were testifying, by their flatter¬ 
ing imitations of Atatvirk’s radical Westernizing policy, that Turkey’s 
prestige had never stood higher in their eyes. 1 In short, in the Islamic 
World it had come to seem likely that the people’s vote would now be 
cast for Westernization in so far as the question of cultural allegiance 
remained a matter of free choice; but it was clear that the issue would 
depend, not entirely on the will of the people directly concerned, but 
partly also on a trial of strength between a Western and a Russian 
World which encircled the Islamic World between them. 

The tension of this Russo-Occidental tug-of-war for ascendancy over 
the Islamic World had been heightened since a.d. 1774 by a progressive 
enhancement of the Islamic World’s importance in two respects—as a 
source of key commodities and as a channel of key communications. 

The Islamic World embraced the homelands of three out of the four 
primary civilizations of the Old World; and the agricultural wealth 
which those now extinct societies had once wrested from the previously 
intractable valleys of the Lower Nile, the Tigris-Euphrates, and the 
Indus had been increased in Egypt and the Panjab, and been partially 
restored in ‘Iraq, by the application of Modern Western methods of 
water-control. The principal addition, however, to the Islamic World’s 
economic resources had been made by the discovery and economic 
utilization of subterranean deposits of mineral oil in regions which had 
never been of any outstanding agricultural value. The natural 'gushers’, 
which, in a pre-Islamic Age, had been turned to religious account by 
Zoroastrian piety to keep alight a perpetual flame in honour of the holi¬ 
ness of Fire, had been noted in a.d. 1723 by the prospector’s eye of Peter 
the Great as a potential economic asset; 2 and, though some 150 years 
had still to pass before an intuition of genius was confirmed by a com¬ 
mercial exploitation of the Baku oil field, the fresh discoveries, which 
followed in rapid succession during the next hundred years after that, 
showed that Baku was only one link in a golden chain stretching north¬ 
westwards to Grozhny and south-eastwards through 'Iraqi Kurdistan 
and Persian Bakhtiyaristan and the Bahrayn Islands into once reputedly 
valueless peninsular Arabian territories which uninformed early- 
twentieth-century Western diplomatists had carved up on the map as 
light-heartedly as uninformed nineteenth-century American politicians 
had paid off the remnants of American Indian peoples deported from 
Georgia with apportionments of then reputedly valueless land well 

1 The shock given to Indian Muslim susceptibilities, in particular, by the Turkish 
Republic’s abolition of the Ottoman Caliphate on the 3rd March, 1924, had not per¬ 
manently alienated the non-Turkish Muslims from Turkey. Its effects had been quickly 
obliterated by the Mat of a success that had justified AtatQrk’s impious audacity in the 
event; and the very disdain with which the Turks, in this chapter of their history, were 
inclined to treat their fellow Muslims perhaps increased these poor relations' respect 
for their now pointedly distant Turkish kinsfolk. The Arabs of Syria and ‘Iraq, who 
were the Turks' nearest Muslim neighbours, could not forget that they had been under 
Turkish rule for four hundred years before the Ottoman Empire had gone into dissolu¬ 
tion in a . d . 1918, and that, in the next chapter of Islamic history, the defeated Turk* 
had maintained their independence while the ‘liberated’ Arabs had merely exchanged 
one alien master for another. 1 See II. ii. 278-9. 



270 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
beyond the Mississippi. 1 By the middle of the twentieth century the oil 
fields of Kuwayt and Sa'udI Arabia had begun to take the shine out of 
the cotton fields of Egypt as it had been taken out of the cotton fields of 
Georgia by the oil fields of Oklahoma; and Russia, Great Britain, 
France, and—last but not least—the United States had already appro¬ 
priated all but the North Persian slice of a fabulously rich Middle 
Eastern oil-cake. 

The geographical results of this scramble for oil had produced a tense 
political situation, since Russia’s slice of the cake in the Caucasus and 
the Western Powers’ slices in Persia and the Arab countries were within 
point-blank range of one another, while the British and French slices 
had come to be only less important in the economy of Western Europe 
than the Russian slice was in the economy of the Soviet Union. 2 

This tension was increased by the revival of the Islamic World’s im¬ 
portance as a node of oecumenical communications. The shortest routes 
between Russia and a circum-Atlantic Western World on the one side 
and India, South-East Asia, Indonesia, China, and Japan on the other 
side all traversed Islamic ground, waters, or air; and on the route-map, 
as on the oil-map, the Soviet Union and the Western Powers were 
at dangerously close quarters. In a.d. 1952, American, British, 
French, and Dutch routes from the Atlantic via the Red Sea or the 
Persian Gulf to the Indian Ocean and the Pacific were flanked on the 
north-cast by Russian outposts in Bulgaria, Transcaucasia, and Trans- 
caspia, while ‘the soft under-belly’ of the Soviet Union in the Ukraine 
and the Caucasus could be commanded, at still closer range, from the 
south by enemy outposts in a Turkey and a Greece over which the 
President of the United States had declared a virtual protectorate on 
the 12th March, 1947, and in a Persia whose name had been added to 
those of Greece and Turkey in this context by the American Secretary 
of State on the 17th March, 1949. A Baku oil field which supplied the 
needs of the greater part of the Volga Basin via the Caspian Sea lay 
within a few miles of the Russo-Persian frontier. 

The military and political awkwardness of this geographical situation 
had been accentuated by a shift in Russia’s centre of gravity since the 
end of the Russo-Turkish War of a.d. 1768-74 which had been compar¬ 
able in magnitude to the shift in the United States' centre of gravity 

1 This incident in the history of the United States has been noticed above on p. 36, 
n. r. 

* In a.d. 1951—between the date in A.D. 1949 when this passage had been written 
and the date in a.d. 1952 when it was being revised for the press—the mounting pres¬ 
sure of Persian national feeling had achieved the expulsion of the Anglo-Iranian Petro¬ 
leum Company from the oil-field in Bakhtiyaristan and from the refineries and wharves 
at 'Abbidan. This outcome of a local collision between the Weaterailing political ideo¬ 
logy of an Islamic people and the economic enterprise of a Western people in this pro¬ 
vince of Dar-al-Islim had thrown into Russia’s lap two fine gift-parcels of unearned 
politico-military increment. In depriving Great Britain of the oil from the South Persia 
field it had diminished, to that extent, the Atlantic Community’s economic, financial, 
and military power; and, in depriving Persia of the royalties on an alien Western com¬ 
mercial company’s profits, it had dried up the previously richest source of Persian public 
revenue and national income and had thereby aggravated the economic and social ills 
from which Persia was already suffering. Considering the invidious width of the gulf, 
in Persia, between the respective standards of living of a tiny dominant minority and a 
miserable agricultural proletariat, this fresh turn of an economic screw in Persia could 
hardly fail to bring grist to the political mill of Communism. 



THE MODERN WEST AND ISLAM 271 

since her declaration of her independence in a . d . 1776. Within that 

J .eriod of a century and three-quarters, the replacement of hunters by 
armers and industrial workers between the Appalachian Mountains and 
the Pacific coast of North America had been emulated in the Old World 
in the replacement of Nomads and wild highlanders by farmers and 
industrial workers in the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe and 
in the Caucasus; and this ci-devant north-western fringe of the Islamic 
World, which had been economically all but virgin soil before its 
annexation by Russia between the years a . d . 1774 and a . d . 1864, had 
since become the Soviet Union’s economic heart. This rapid conjuring 
into existence of a new world opening on to the northern and eastern 
shores of the Black Sea, with the whole of the Soviet Union for its hinter¬ 
land, had created—or, in more accurate terms, re-created—a question 
concerning the control of the Straits leading out of the Black Sea into 
the Aegean which had been dormant so long as the Black Sea had been 
an ‘Ottoman lake’; and the coincidence in date between Russia’s 
acquisition of a coastline on the Black Sea and the Western Powers’ re¬ 
opening of the short route between the Western World and India had 
started a political game of naughts and crosses 1 in which Russia found 
herself perpetually being thwarted by a Western player who in one 
round might call herself the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy, in another 
round Great Britain, in another Germany, and in another the United 
States, but who betrayed a consistently Western identity by persisting, 
through all these metamorphoses, in making moves that kept Russia in 
check. 

On the 12th March, 1947, when President Truman gave Russia notice 
that the United States had taken over the Western player's role, the 

S ime had become an exasperating one from a Russian standpoint, since 
ussia’s objective remained unattained while her stake in the game had 
been steadily increasing in value. In a.d. 1774 the Empress Catherine 
had reasonably expected to live to take the short and logical steps from 
Azov to Constantinople and Gallipoli; yet in a.d. 1947 these keys to 
Russia’s Pontic front-door were still in non-Russian hands; and, though 
since a.d. 1944 the Russian Army had been astride the Balkan Range, 
on Constantinople’s Bulgarian threshold, 2 Soviet statesmen could 
hardly forget that other Russian armies had pushed their way still closer 
to Constantinople in a.d. 1829 and a.d. 1878 without having managed 
on either occasion to seize a prize that had then lain so nearly within 
their grasp. Meanwhile, the vulnerability of Russia’s new vital organs in 
the Ukraine and the Caucasus to attack by Western Sea Powers enjoying 
a right of way into the Black Sea had been demonstrated on three 
occasions: in the Crimean War (gerebatur a.d. 1853-6); in a.d. 1878, 
when the exposure of a victorious Russian army’s Pontic flank to the 

« Compare the power game known as 'Lengthways and crossways’ (Uung-hiy) 
which was played between the contending parochial states of a Sinic World in the last 
phase of their fratricidal warfare with one another (see Franke, O.: Geschichtc des 
Chintsischen Reiches, vol. i (Berlin 1930, de Gruyter), p. 193). 

» The Soviet Union had compelled Bulgaria to transfer her allegiance to her from 
Germany on the 9th September, 1944. when Russian troops had entered Bulgaria from 
the Dobruja. 



272 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
possibility of an attack by the British Navy had enabled the Western 
Powers to convert the Treaty of San Stefano into the Treaty of Berlin; 
and in a.d. 1918-20, when the Western Powers had prolonged the 
resistance in Russia to the establishment of the Bolshevik regime by 
conveying munitions, via the Straits, to the ‘White’ Russian armies of 
Generals Denikin and Wrangcl. On each of these occasions, British sea 
power had been able to attack or threaten Russia at a vital point thanks 
to a command of the passage through the Straits; and, when President 
Truman enunciated his doctrine in a.d. 1947, the Soviet Government 
must have had these precedents in mind—even though they might hope 
that, if occasion arose, the passage of the Straits could now be denied to 
the American Navy by a Soviet Air Force operating from Bulgarian 
bases. 

In these circumstances the future of the Islamic World, as well as that 
of a non-Russian Orthodox Christendom, remained unpredictable at 
the time of writing. 

5. The Modern West and the Jews 

The Peculiarities of the Western Province of a Jewish Diaspora's Domain 

Whatever might be the ultimate general verdict of Mankind on the 
Western Civilization in the modern chapter of its history, it was already 
manifest mid-way through the twentieth century of the Christian Era, 
some 450 years after the beginning of this epoch, that Modern Western 
Man had branded himself with two particular marks of lasting infamy 
by the commission of two crimes that were indelibly inscribed on his 
record. One of these crimes was the shipping of Negro slaves from 
Africa to labour on plantations in the New World; 1 the other was the 

1 The encounter between the white-skinned founders of the Western Society and the 
dark-skinned members of primitive societies whom these Whites had conscripted by 
force into the Western Society’s ranks during the modern chapter of Western history 
had a generic affinity with the encounters between the representatives of different 
civilizations that are the subject of the present Part of this Study, and not least with the 
encounter between Western Christendom and Jewry. 

Like the feelings of Gentile Westerners about the Jews in their midst, the feelings of 
White Westerners about the Negroes in their midst were associated with an awareness 
of certain differences in physique between a dominant majority and a penalized minority, 
but there was conclusive evidence that these feelings of antipathy were not in either case 
an automatic psychic reaction to a visual perception of distinctive physical traits. The 
feelings aroused in a Western Gentile psyche by the sight of an Armcnoid nose on 
the face of a Jew were not aroused by the sight of a nose of the same configuration on the 
face of a Turk (and this physiognomy was common among the Turks as well as among 
the Jews, since it had been communicated to the population of Palestine by Indo- 
European-speaking Hittitc immigrants from Anatolia and not by Semitic-speaking 
Israelite immigrants from Arabia). This showed that the Western Gentile’s antipathy 
towards the Jew was excited, not by a physical difference, but by social and cultural 
differences which had come to be symbolized by a physical difference when the 
Western Gentile encountered the Armcnoid physiognomy in a Jew, though the same 
physiognomy could be encountered by the same Westerner without producing 
on him the same psychological effect when he met it in a Turkish representative 
of an Iranic Muslim Society towards which the Western World’s attitude was different 
from its attitude towards Jewry. The evidence likewise showed that the White 
Westerner’s antipathy towards the Negro was not an automatic effect of a physical 
difference in pigmentation and in odour. A White inhabitant of the Southern States of 
the United States who would have objected to the propinquity of one of his Negro 
fellow citizens as a fellow passenger in a pullman car felt no repugnance at being waited 
upon by a Negro attendant in the same car at equally close quarters; the Negro physique 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 273 
extermination of a Jewish diaspork in the European homeland of Western 
Christendom; and these two atrocities had one horrifying common 
feature. In both of them a primaeval wickedness and cruelty that were 
innate in Human Nature had been mated with a capacity for planning 
and execution that could have been exhibited only by a technologically 
mature civilization; and this shocking combination of technological 
maturity with moral depravity distinguished these cold-blooded Modern 
Western crimes from the outrages committed by Primitive Man, which, 
humanly sinful though they too were, still had in them something of the 
innocence of a predator)' Pre-Human Nature as exhibited in the tiger 
or the shark. 1 

It was, of course, true that the responsibility for these two revolting 
Modern Western crimes was not shared in equal proportions by all 
members of the Modem Western Society. The Judas share of the crime 
against the African Negroes lay on the heads of the English and their 
colonists on the eastern seaboard of North America; the Judas share of 
the crime against the Jews lay on the heads of the Spaniards, Portuguese, 
and Germans. Yet these direst criminals had, after all, been eminent 
exponents of the Western Civilization of their day; and their over¬ 
whelming guilt was a salutarily terrifying reminder of the truth that 
Civilization was no permanent transfiguration of the essence of Human 
Nature, but was merely a brittle ‘cake of custom’ 2 precariously plastered 
over the crater of a live spiritual volcano, where it was at the mercy of 

E nnial eruptions of Original Sin. In the casting up of the Western 
ety’s final account, it was conceivable, no doubt, that these particular 
English, American, Spanish, Portuguese, and German entries on the 
debit side might be more than balanced by other entries to Western 
Man’s credit; but it could already be forecast that the eventual summing- 
up would give no warrant for the pharisaical complacency to which 
Modern Western Man had been prone—especially during the quarter of 
a millennium between the end of the Modern Western Wars of Religion 
and the outbreak of the First World War. 

The tragic outcome of the encounter between the Western World and 
Jewry—a tragedy which eventually numbered the Palestinian Arabs 

was not offensive to a White Southerner in a Negro whose profession stamped him as a 
menial; and there were Whites who would have been shocked to sec lawful wedlock 
made legal between persons of different colour without being shocked at seeing White 
men cohabiting with coloured concubines. 

This evidence shows that in the relation between White Westerners and Negroes, as 
in the relation between Gentile Westerners and Jews, the stumbling-block was a differ¬ 
ence, not of race, but of social standing and of culture. All the same, the encounter 
between the Modem West and the Negroes falls outside the scope of the present Part 
of this Study, since, at the time when the Negroes were smitten bv the Western World's 
impact, they were not the representatives of a civilization (in the sense in which the 
term is used in this work), but were still in the primitive state of culture; and even this 
primitive social heritage was lost by those Negroes who were shipped to the New World 
as slaves. The history of the relations between Negroes and White Westerners is thus 
part of the domestic history of the Western World. It has been touched upon in II. ii. 
218-20 and in V. v. 153 and 168. 

1 ‘Funded civilisation' makes ‘the savage of Civilisation more terrible than the savage 
of Barbarism’ (Meadows, T. T.: The Chinese and their Rebellions .... to which is added 
An Essay on Civilisation and its Present State in the East and West (London >856, Smith 
Elder), p. 518). 

1 Bagchot, W.: Physics and Politics, 10th ed. (London 1894, Kegan Paul), pp. 27 
and 35, quoted in II. i. 192. 



274 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
among its innocent victims—was the consequence of an interplay be¬ 
tween Original Sin and a particular conjunction of social circumstances, 
and the first step towards an understanding of the tragedy was to in¬ 
quire how far these circumstances accounted for it. 

Jewry, in the form in which it collided with Western Christendom, 
was certainly an exceptional social phenomenon, but it was also certainly 
not unique. Jewry was exceptional in being a fossilized relic of a civiliza¬ 
tion that was extinct in every other shape. 1 The Syriac parochial state of 
Judah, from which Jewry was derived, had been one of a number of 
Hebrew, Phoenician, Aramaean, and Philistine communities into which 
a Syriac Society had articulated itself in its growth stage; but, whereas 
Judah’s sister communities, including her next-of-kin, Israel, had lost 
their identity, as well as their statehood, as a result of fatal injuries which 
the Syriac Society had sustained from successive collisions with its 
Babylonic and Hellenic neighbours, the same challenges had stimulated 
the Jews to create for themselves a new mode of corporate existence in 
which they managed to survive the loss of their state and their country 
by preserving their identity as a diaspora among an alien majority 
and under alien rule. This exceptionally successful Jewish reaction to 
a challenge to which most Syriac communities had succumbed was 
not, however, unique; for the Jewish diaspora in the Islamic and the 
Christian World had an historical counterpart in the Parsee diaspora 
in India, which was another fossilized relic of the same extinct Syriac 
Society. 

The Parsees were survivors of Iranian converts to the Syriac Civiliza¬ 
tion who had given the Syriac Society a universal state in the shape of 
the Achaemcnian Empire; the Parsee, like the Jewish, community was 
the monument of a victorious will to outlive the loss of state and country; 
and the Parsees, too, had suffered this loss as a result of successive 
collisions between the Syriac World and neighbouring societies. Like 
the Jews during the three centuries ending in a.d. 135, the Parsees’ 
Zoroastrian Iranian forefathers had sacrificed themselves in an un¬ 
successful attempt to eject an intrusive Hellenism by force from a 
conquered Syriac World; and the penalty for failure, which had been 
inflicted on the Jews in the first and second centuries of the Christian 
Era by the Hellenic Civilization’s Roman champions, had been inflicted 
on the Zoroastrian Iranians in the seventh century by Primitive Muslim 
Arab barbarian invaders of the Roman and Sasanian empires who were 
completing the Zoroastrian Iranians’ uncompleted task by liberating the 
Syriac World west of the Euphrates from an Hellenic ascendancy that 
by this date had persisted there for nearly a thousand years. In these 
similar crises in their history the Jews and the Parsees had preserved 
their identity by the same creative feat of improvising new institu¬ 
tions and specializing in new activities. They had found in the elaboration 
of their heritage of religious law a new social cement to replace a political 
bond that had perished with their state, and they had survived the 
disastrous economic consequences of being uprooted from the land of 
their fathers by developing, in the land of their exile, a special skill in 

* For this phenomenon of ‘fosailization’, sec I. i. 35, 51, and 90-92. 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 275 

commerce and other urban business in lieu of a husbandry which these 
landless refugees were no longer able to pursue. 1 

Nor were these Jewish and Parsee diasporas the only fossils that an 
extinct Syriac Society had left behind it; for, before the Primitive Muslim 
Arabs succeeded in carrying out the task of ejecting Hellenism in which 
the Jews and the Zoroastrians had failed, a second series of abortive 
attempts to attain the same objective had been made by champions of a 
submerged Syriac Society within the bosom of the Christian Church; 
this second unsuccessful Syriac counter-offensive in its turn had precipi¬ 
tated a number of ‘fossils in diaspora’ in the shape of the Nestorian and 
Monophysite Christian Churches; and these scattered Christian com¬ 
munities, like their Jewish and Parsee forerunners, had preserved their 
identity through a devotion to distinctive religious rites and a proficiency 
in commerce and finance. Nor, again, was the Syriac Society the only 
civilization in which communities that had lost their statehood and had 
been uprooted from the soil had succeeded in surviving through a com¬ 
bination of ecclesiastical discipline with business enterprise. In the main 
body of Orthodox Christendom under an alien Ottoman regime, a 
subjugated Greek Orthodox Christian community had been partially 
uprooted from the soil, and these Greek Orthodox Christian deracines 
had responded to this ordeal by accommodating themselves to changes in 
their economic activities and their social organization on lines which 
carried them far along the road towards becoming a diaspora of the same 
type as the Gregorian Armenian, Jacobite Syrian, and Coptic Egyptian 
Monophysites and the pre-Christian stratum of Syriac 'fossils’ repre¬ 
sented by the Jews and the Parsces. 

Indeed, the millet system of the Ottoman Empire* was merely a 
systematically organized version of a communal structure of society 
which had grown up spontaneously in the Syriac World after the Syriac 
peoples had been inextricably intermingled with one another by the 
malice of an Assyrian militarism that had not been content to pulverize 
its victims but had scattered the survivors abroad in order to make sure 
that they should never find a chance of retrieving their political fortunes. 
The consequent rearticulation of Society into a network of geographically 
intermingled oecumenical communities in place of a patchwork of geo¬ 
graphically segregated parochial states had been inherited from the 
Syriac Society by its Iranic and Arabic Muslim successors and had 
subsequently been imposed by 'Osmanli Iranic Muslim empire-builders 
on a prostrate Orthodox Christendom which they had subjugated by the 
employment of Assyrian methods of barbarism. 

In this historical perspective it is manifest that the Jewish diaspori 
encountered by a Western Christendom, so far from being a unique 
social phenomenon, was one among a number of surviving representa¬ 
tives of a long established and widely distributed species of community. 
This species had come to be the standard type in the Syriac World after 
* the culminating paroxysm of Assyrian militarism; it had always been the 

1 For example* of the stimulus of penalizations on the economic and other planes, 
see II. ii. 108-59. 

* For an account of this system of communal organization, see pp. 184-6, above. 



276 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
standard type in the two Islamic societies that were the Syriac Society’s 
offspring, and it had also been the standard type in the main body of 
Orthodox Christendom during the period of the Ottoman regime. The 
area over which the Jewish diaspora had spread itself included, of 
course, the domains of the Islamic societies as well as those of the 
Christendoms, and, if we think of this area as being the oecumenical 
domain of the Jewish ‘millet’ and look at it, through Jewish eyes, as a 
unity, we shall perceive that—at least in the Early Modern Age, before 
the Ottoman Orthodox Christians had transferred their cultural 
allegiance from their ‘Osmanli masters to their Western neighbours— 
the millet system which was exemplified in the social organization of the 
J ewish diaspora was the standard type of social structure in three out of the 
five provinces of Jewry’s empire. Of the remaining two provinces we can 
leave the Russian Orthodox Christian province out of the reckoning; for 
there were hardly any Jews in Russian Orthodox Christendom outside 
‘the Jewish Pale’ of the Russian Empire, and, while it was true that a 

2 'ority of the Jewish population of the World was concentrated in ‘the 
before its devastation in the first and second world wars, the Pale had 
to be reckoned as falling within the Western and not the Russian Christian 
province of a Jewish Oikoumeni, since the Jewish diaspora in the Pale had 
originated in Western Christendom and had drifted into this originally 
Russian territory' in the wake of medieval Polish and Lithuanian Western 
Christian conquerors. 2 In effect, therefore, the millet system of social 
organization was the rule in three out of four effectively occupied 
provinces of Jewry's oecumenical empire, and was exceptional in the 
Western Christian province alone. 

This conclusion raises the question whether the peculiar social setting 
of the tragic encounter between Jewry and Western Christendom may 
not be found to consist in peculiarities on the Western at least as much 
as on the Jewish side; and, when we put this question, we can see that 
the course of Western history was indeed peculiar in at least three 
respects that are all relevant to the history’of Jewish-Occidental relations. 
In the first place the Western Society articulated itself into a patchwork 
of geographically segregated communities each occupying exclusively a 
separate local territory’ of its own, instead of articulating itself into a net¬ 
work of geographically intermingled communities on the pattern prevail¬ 
ing in the other provinces of the Jewish World. In the second place the 
Western Society transformed itself in the course of its history from an 
ultra-rural society of peasants and landlords 3 into an ultra-urban society 

* The history of this western fringe of Russian Orthodox Christendom, which had 
been overrun by Western Christian conquerors in the fourteenth century and had been 
reannexed to the unconquered core of Russia between a.d. 1772 and a.d. 1945, has been 
touched upon on pp. 126-0, above, and is dealt with again on pp. 398-400, below. 

2 See II. ii. 241-2. Dr. James Parkes here makes the comment that the Jewish com¬ 
munity in the Pale was not wholly of West European provenance. There were elements 
in it that had come from the opposite side of the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian 
Steppe; and these elements included Qara’im as well as orthodox Talmudists from the 
Crimea who were believed to be of Khazar origin (see II. ii. 410-1). 

1 Christopher Dawson points out, in Religion and the Rise of Western Culture (Lon¬ 
don 1950, Sheed and Ward), pp. 56-57. that the Western Christian peasant’s life and 
work were restored to honour in this age by a rustic Benedictine monasticism. See also 
the present Study, III. iii. 266. 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 277 
of artisans and bourgeois. In the third place this nationalist-minded and 
middlc-class-mindedlattcr-day Western Society emerged surprisingly and 
suddenly, at the close of the fifteenth century of the Christian Era, from the 
relative obscurity of the medieval chapter of its history and came rapidly 
to overshadow all the rest of the traversable and habitable surface of the 
planet. Each of these three peculiar features of Western life and history 
made its effect on the fortunes of that unlucky fraction of a Jewish diaspora 
that happened to have wandered into this Western Ultima Thule of a pre- 
da Gaman World whose centre-point was, not Portugal, but Farghanah. 

The Persecution of the Peninsular Jews under a Visigothic Catholic 
Christian Regime 

The inner connexion between Antisemitism and the Western Christian 
ideal of a homogeneous community embracing all the inhabitants of a 
particular territory reveals itself clearly in the history of the Jewish 
diaspora in the Iberian Peninsula. 

Though the ideal of homogeneity was inherited by Western Christen¬ 
dom from a converted Hellenic World whose inhabitants had latterly 
come to be uniformly Roman in their political status and uniformly 
Christian in their religion, apart from the Jews , 1 the conquest of the 
lion’s share of a dissolving Catholic Christian Roman Empire’s western 
provinces by Arian Christian Teutonic barbarian war-bands reopened 
the question of a nascent Western Society’s future social structure by 
introducing the germs of a millet system into it. The conquerors 
cherished their Teutonic communal law and their Arian communal 
religion as distinctive badges which served to mark them off from their 
Catholic Roman subjects , 2 and another social effect of the conquest was 
a hardening of the distinction between freemen and slaves, which had 
been softened by a vein of humanity in the Roman Law of the Imperial 
Age. In the Roman Empire’s Teutonic barbarian successor-states the 
servile element in the population came to be marked off from the free 
element more sharply than before, through changes for the worse in both 
their treatment and their status . 2 Here were the rudiments of a society 
articulated along horizontal instead of vertical lines into geographically 
intermingled but socially segregated communities on the millet pattern. 
In a society of this structure a Jewish diaspora would not strike a jarring 
note; and in fact there is no evidence of any serious collision between 
the Jewish diaspora in the Iberian Peninsula and the successor-state of 
the Roman Empire that had been established there by the Visigoths so 
long as the Western Christian body social in the Visigothic dominions 

1 A toleration of the Jewish diaspori which went against the grain of Judaic intoler¬ 
ance in the ithos of Christianity was part of the Christian Roman Empire’s political 
heritage from an antecedent pagan rdgimc. The pagan Roman authorities’ forbearance 
towards Judaism had been a surprising exception to their general rule of repressing 
Greek and Oriental missionary religions. Judaism had aggravated the Dionysiac and 
Christian offence of making proselytes by lending itself to a political militancy of which 
both Bacchus-worship and Christianity were innocent. Yet a pagan Roman Government 
had accorded to the Jews a religious toleration which it had denied to the Bacchants 
(sec II. ii. 216) and to the Christians. 4 Sec V. v. 227-9 »nd VI. vii. 286-8. 

» For one local manifestation of this general tendency, see Ziegler, A. K.: Church and 
Stale in Visigothic Spain (Washington, D.C. 1930, Catholic University of America), 

pp. 170-6. 



278 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
continued to be internally articulated on horizontal lines into a Gothic 
Arian millet and a Roman Catholic millet that was sharply divided in 
its turn into a free and a servile social stratum. 

In the course of the sixth and seventh centuries, however, the gulf 
between the slave and the free community in Visigothia was diminished, 
and the gulf between the Roman and the Gothic community was com¬ 
pletely bridged, by the cumulative results of a series of local measures 1 
which reflected an oecumenical tendency in the Western Christendom of 
that age to revert from an embryonic millet system to the Hellenic tradi¬ 
tion of social homogeneity; 2 and, pari passu with this Gleichsclialtung of 
the Christian communities, a tension arose in Visigothia between a more 
and more thoroughly unified Christian people and a consequently more 
and more conspicuously peculiar Jewish millet. The accentuation of this 
tension is registered in a series of anti-Jewish enactments of a Judaically 
fanatical ferocity 3 that presents a painful contrast to the simultaneously 
increasing humanity of the contemporary legislation for protecting slaves 

* The first notable breach in the barrier between Roman and Visigoth was the abro¬ 
gation in the reign of King Leovigild (regnabat a.d. 568-86) of a law, forbidding inter¬ 
marriage between Romans and barbarians under pain of death, which had been enacted 
originally from the Roman side in a.d. 375 in a constitution of the Emperors Valentinian 
and Valens and had been incorporated in a.d. 506 into the Visigothic King Alaric II’s 
Lex Romana Visigothonm, alias Bteviarium Aland (Ziegler, op. cit., p. 23). The crucial 
step was the conversion of King Recared (regnabat a.d. 586-601) from Arianism to 
Catholicism in A.D. *87. The Visigothic community followed their king’s lead, and the 
consequent union of Goths and Romans took institutional shape in a series of eighteen 
nations) councils, held at Toledo between the years a.d. 589 and 701 inclusive (ibid., 
p. 3 S). in which a minority of laymen co-operated with a majority of bishops and other 
denes in enacting canons that did not deal exclusively with ecclesiastical affairs. The 
final step was taken by King Receswinth (regnabat a.d. 649-72) when in a.d. 654 he 
abrogated simultaneously the barbarian law under which his Gothic subjects had been 
living and the Roman Law under which his Roman subject* had been living, and gave 
exclusive legal currency in his dominions to a new Liber Iudiciorum (alias Forum Iudieum), 
in which Roman and barbarian elements were blended (ibid., pp. 62-64, and the present 
Study, VI. vii. 288). In this new law of the land, which was binding on all the King’s 
subjects, the Roman clement was predominant (Ziegler, op. cit., p. 75). 

* The decisive steps in this direction were taken by statesmen who were not Visigoths. 
The first step, which was the most decisive of all, was the Salian Frank war-lord Clovis’s 
conversion from paganism to Catholic Christianity in a.d. 496; the next was the destruc¬ 
tion of the Arian barbarian successor-states of the Roman Empire in Africa and Italy 
by the Emperor Justinian in a.d. 533-52; the third was the conversion of the English 
from paganism to Catholic Christianity by Gregory the Great’s missionaries in and after 
A.D. 597. If the Gothic, Burgundian, and Vandal instead of the Frankish and English 
Teutonic barbarian successor-states of the Roman Empire had set the pattern for the 
subsequent development of the structure of the Western Society, Western Christendom 
might have become, like the Islamic Society, a hierarchy of millets or, like the Hindu 
Society, a hierarchy of castes in which the Arian war-bands would have been the 
Kshatriyas and a Catholic clergy the Brahmans. 

s Before the beginning of the progressive amalgamation of the Christian communities 
in the Visigothic Kingdom, the life of the Jewish dinsporii there had been governed by 
the terms of Alaric II’s Lex Romana Visigothorum. Under this code, Jews were forbidden 
to attempt to convert Christians to Judaism, to marry Christians, and to buy Christian 
slaves; they were excluded from military’ snd civil office without being exempted from 
onerous public duties (munera); and they were forbidden to build new synagogues. 
They were permitted, however, to keep existing synagogues in repair and to practise 
their religion; they were exempted from the transaction of fiscal or other public business 
on the sabbath day; and they were allowed a considerable measure of communal auto¬ 
nomy. ‘The authority of Jewish superiors was acknowledged not only in what concerned 
their own religion but also in civil matters. Jews might, if they wished, have recourse 
to their own elder* for arbitration’ (Ziegler, op. cit., p. 187, following L.R.V. ii. x, 10). 
Thereafter, the position of the Jews in Visigothia deteriorated (though an ever more 
savage anti-Jewish legislation seems largely to have remained a dead letter owing to the 
venality of the public authorities, including the Crown and the Episcopate, and the 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 279 
against their masters' and pauperes against potentiores . 2 ‘The maltreat¬ 
ment of the Jews in the Visigothic Kingdom was the unfortunate result 
of the union between Church and State .’ 3 

Though the wealth of the Peninsular Jews and the venality of their 
Christian oppressors made the anti-Jewish policy of the Visigothic 
Kingdom ‘ridiculously ineffective ’, 4 it is not surprising that the 
Visigothic Crown’s Jewish subjects should have retorted to Egica’s 

Jews’ command of the resources for paying the necessary bribes). In a.d. 580 the First 
Council of Toledo, at King Rccared’s request, reaffirmed anti-Jewish provisions of the 
Lex Romana Visigothorum that had fallen into disuse (Ziegler, op. cit., p. 189). King 
Siscbut {regnabat A.D. 612-21) gave the Jews a choice between conversion to Christianity 
and banishment from the kingdom (Ziegler, op. cit., p. 190, following Isidore of Seville, 
Hiitoria Gothorum, 60, and Continuelio Jsidori , 15), but in this he was acting independently 
of the Church, and the Fourth Council of Toledo ( sedebat a.d. 633) forbade further com¬ 
pulsory conversions, though it did not allow Jews already compulsorily converted to 
relapse (ibid., pp. 190 and 191). The Sixth Council {sedebat a.d. 638) commended King 
Chintila ( regnabat a.d. 636-40) for having forbidden unconverted Jews to remain in the 
kingdom and took steps of its own to ensure the effective execution of the King’s ruling 
(ibid., p. 192). King Reccswinth ( regnabat a.d. 649-72) attacked the Jews in his royal 
message {tomus) to the Eighth Council {tedebat a.d. 653); and, when the Eighth Council 
declined to go beyond the limits of the Fourth Council’s anti-Jewish measures, Rece- 
swinth widened the breach between Christendom and Jewry in his kingdom by pro¬ 
mulgating intolerable anti-Jewish legislation of his own in the very year a.d. 654 in which 
he completed the closing of the breach between his Roman and his Gothic Catholic 
Christian subjects by bringing them under a common law. Reccswinth prohibited the 
practice of the Jewish religion under pain of death (Ziegler, op. cit., p. 193, following 
Leges Visigothorum, xii. 2. 12, 16, 17). King Erwig {regnabat a.d. 680-7) promulgated 
twenty-eight laws against the Jews (L.V. xii. 3. 1-28), which were endorsed by the 
Twelfth Council (sedebat A.D. 681); and the third of these laid it down that they must 
abjure Judaism within a year under pain—not, now, of death, but of exile and forfeiture 
of property (Ziegler, op. cit., pp. 194-5)- King Egica {regnabat a.d. 687-702) tried to cut 
the root of the economic power which nad enabled the Jews largely to elude the previous 
legislation against them by playing upon the Christian authorities' venality. He in¬ 
creased the special (axes payable by the Jews and at the same time forbade unconverted 
Jews to transact commercial business with Christians or to engage in foreign trade, and 
required them to sell to the fiscus any real property that they had acquired from Christ¬ 
ians (Ziegler op. cit., p. 195, following L.V. xii. 2. t8). The Sixteenth Council {sedebat 
A.D. 693) approved Egica’s legislation (Ziegler, op. cit., p. 195). 

In this sordid Visigothian tale there is a hidden vein of tragic irony, for, though the 
vice of fanaticism acauircd the new name of 'bigotry' from the conspicuousness of the 
Visigoths’ practice of it, these Teutonic barbarians were not in fact the first 'bigots’ 
known to history. The abuse of political power for the inhuman purpose of imposing 
on a subject minority a choice between the abandonment of its ancestral religion and the 
extreme penalty of banishment or even death had been practised by the Jews against 
their Gentile neighbours in Syria seven hundred years before they themselves had been 
confronted with the same choice by the Visigoths in the Iberian Peninsula. The earliest 
known instance of ’bigotry’ is the compulsory conversion of the conquered Gentiles of 
Galilee to Judaism by their Maccabaean Jewish conqueror Alexander Jannacus in the 
first quarter of the last century 8.C. (see II. ii. 73. and V. vi. 478 and 499, n. 1); and the 
Maccabaean temper was inherited by Christendom from a Jewry that came to be 
the principal victim of this Jewish vein in the Christian religion. Jewish ‘Maccabaeanism’ 
wa 9 not, of course, the sole source of Christian ’Antisemitism’, for ’Antisemitism’ had 
been rife in a pre-Christian Hellenic World, at Alexandria and elsewhere, from the 
second century B.c. onwards (see Marcus, R.: Antisemitism in the Hellenistic World 
(New York 1946, Conference on Jewish Relations)); but the combination of a fanatical 
religious intolerance with an antipathy arising from social ar.d economic grievances was 
an aggravation of pre-Christian ‘Antisemitism’ into which Christianity was betrayed by 
the Judaic, not the Hellenic, clement in its fithos. 

1 See Ziegler, op. cit., pp. 176-9. * See ibid., p. 169. 

J Ziegler, op. dt., p. 197. The honesty of this verdict delivered by a Modem Western 
scholar who was also a priest of the Roman Catholic Church was as impressive as it was 
creditable to the author; and Father Ziegler’s honesty is equalled by his acumen. He 
points out that the Catholic Visigothia of A.D. 587-7” "’as not, as has sometimes been 
supposed, a hierocracy, but was an Erastian state, and that a partnership which was a 
boon to the commonwealth was a doubtful blessing for the Church (ibid., pp. 126-33). 

4 Ziegler, op. dt., p. 198. 



2 8o ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

legislation by conspiring with their co-religionists in North-West Africa 
to procure the intervention of the Arabs. The detection of the con¬ 
spiracy by the Visigothic government in a.d. 694’ and the consequent 
reprisals 1 neither gave the Peninsular Jews the coup de grdee nor saved 
the Visigothic Kingdom from destruction after the Arabs’ hands had 
been freed for a farther westward advance by their definitive conquest 
of Carthage from her Roman defenders in a.d. 698; and the Peninsular 
Jews survived to sec their intuition justified by five hundred years’ 
experience of a Muslim regime (vigebat a.d. 711-1212) under which 
an autonomous diaspora was not a peculiar people. 

The Respite for the Peninsular Jews under Andalusian and Ottoman Muslim 
Regimes 

The social effect of the Arab conquest of the Iberian Peninsula was 
indeed to make the Jewish community at home there again by re¬ 
establishing the horizontally articulated structure of society that had 
prevailed there before the conversion of the Visigoths from Arian to 
Catholic Christianity. The metropolitan territory of the Umayyad Arab 
Caliphate was Syria, where the millet system of communal organization 
had been endemic since the Achaemenian Age; and, before the Primitive 
Muslim Arabs had broken through the Roman limes, this indigenous 
way of life had already reasserted itself in both Syria and Egypt. The 
fifth century of the Christian Era, which had seen the unity of the 
Christian society fractured in the western provinces of the Roman 
Empire by the imposition of an Arian barbarian ‘ascendancy’ on a 

Catholic Roman subject population, had seen it fractured simultaneously 
in the eastern provinces by the secession of a Monophysite Syriac sub¬ 
merged population from a Catholic Roman ‘ascendancy’; and, when in 
the seventh century this ‘Mclchite’ regime, as it was nicknamed by the 
Imperialists' disaffected Monophysite Christian subjects, was replaced 
by a Muslim barbarian ‘ascendancy’, the Umayyad Arab Muslim 
successor-state of the Roman Empire reproduced, point for point, the 
social structure of the Empire’s Teutonic Arian successor-states in 
the West before their annihilation or conversion. 3 The Arab conquest 

« Sec Ziegler, op. cit., pp. 121 and 105-6. 

1 The Seventeenth Council of Toledo (itdebat a.d. 694) was specially convened by 
King Egica to deal with this emergency, and it rose to the occasion. By the eighth canon 
of this council, ‘all the Jews were declared enslaved to Christian masters, who were to see 
to it that no Jewish rites were practised. Their goods were confiscated to the fiscus, and 
their children after attaining the age of seven were to be taken from them and reared 
as Christiana’. The Jews of Scptimania were exempted from this sentence at Egica’a 
request (ibid., p. 196). 

* There was perhaps a possibility that the Arab Muslim conquerors of Syria and 
Egypt might have followed the path of the Visigothic Arian Christian conquerors of the 
Iberian Peninsula to the length of eventually adopting the Christianity of their subjects 
in place of their own distinctive religion. Islam (as would have become evident in that 
event) had originated in an Arab barbarian prophet’s attempt to provide his own people 
with a counterpart of the Christianity of their neighbours, and Muhammadanism might 
have shared the fate of Arius’s Christian heresy. The Umayyad beneficiaries of Muham¬ 
mad’s political genius were (save for ‘Umar II) as luke-warm in their allegiance to their 
official faith as they were susceptible to the culture of the Monophysite Arab ex-wardens 
of the Roman Empire’s Syrian limes, whose fraternization with the Umayyads had helped 
to make the usurping dynasty’s fortunes. If some Umayyad caliph had abandoned Islam 
for Monophysite Christianity, the last chapter of Syriac history might have taken the 
same tum as the first chapter of Western history in the Iberian Peninsula. 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 281 
of the Iberian Peninsula brought the conquerors’ institutions in its 
train; and thus, after the Visigoths’ downfall in a . d . 711, the social 
organization of the Iberian Peninsula reverted to what it had been before 
the Visigoths’ conversion to Catholicism in a . d . 587. A Catholic Christian 
population again found itself subject to a barbarian ‘ascendancy’ with a 
distinctive communal religion and law of its own; and the substitution 
of Muslim Arabs for Arian Christian Goths in the top layer of a now 
again horizontally articulated society was wholly to the Peninsular Jews’ 
advantage, since the Jewish survivors and the Arab liberators of a Syriac 
Society whose civilization was their common heritage were drawn to¬ 
wards one another by a cultural affinity of which there was no more than 
a trace in the relations between the Jews and the Arian Christians. 

The w’ell-being enjoyed by the Jewish diaspora in the Peninsula under 
a Muslim regime did not outlive the Peninsular Muslim Power's collapse; 
for the Medieval Catholic Christian barbarian conquerors of the Andalu¬ 
sian Umayyad Caliphate’s domain were dedicated to that ideal of a 
homogeneous Catholic Christian commonwealth that had governed the 
policy of the Visigothic barbarian successor-state of the Roman Empire 
during the years a . d . 587-711, and, unlike seventh-century Visigothia, 
fifteenth-century Spain and Portugal conscientiously carried this fanati¬ 
cal policy of Gleichschaltung into effect. Between a . d . 1391 and a . d . 1497 
the Jewish diaspora in the Peninsula was compelled either to go into 
exile or to profess conversion to Catholic Christianity. 1 

In the extremity to which they were thus reduced by the abrogation 
of the millet system in a province of D§r-al-Isl 3 m that had been annexed 
to a Medieval Western Christendom, some of the Peninsular Jews were 
saved by being given asylum in an Orthodox Christian World where the 
millet system had recently been introduced by Ottoman Muslim con¬ 
querors. 2 In the commercial centres of an oecumenical empire in which 
the rest of Society was organized on the same communal lines, a refugee 
Peninsular Jewish diaspora enjoyed a further spell of well-being 3 until, 
some four centuries after their transplantation, Rumelia, where the social 
climate had been genial for the Jews in the heyday of the Ottoman 
regime, was overtaken by the inclement social conditions that had 
already frozen the Jews out of the Iberian Peninsula. The Salonican 
Sephardim were threatened with catastrophe when the non-Jcwish 
millets of the Ottoman Empire, including eventually the ci-devant 
Muslim ‘ascendancy’ itself, became converts to the political ideology of 
the Western World in the virulently extreme form of Modern Western 
Nationalism. 4 

The Causes of the Western Christians' Ill-treatment of the Jews 

The amenity of being a normal, not a peculiar, social phenomenon was 
not the only benefit accruing to an autonomous Jewish diaspori under 

1 See II. ii. 244. 

* Others found asylum in Holland and at Leghorn (see II. ii. 244, and p. 286, below), 

and other* again in North-West Africa. 3 bee II. 11. 244-7. 

* The conversion of the ex-Ottoman Orthodox Christian and Muslim peoples to 
Modem Western Nationalism has been dealt with on pp. 189-92 and 263-8, above. 



282 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
Muslim rule. In Dar-al-Islam the Jews’ liberty to live their communal 
life in their own way was not precariously dependent on a fortunate 
absence of friction thanks to the congruity of this way of life with the 
Islamic social environment; it was positively guaranteed by stipulations 
of the Islamic Law. The Prophet Muhammad himself had expressly laid 
it down in the Qur’an that Jews and Christians were to be allowed to go 
on practising their own religions under the protection of the Islamic 
state if they submitted to Muslim rule and agreed to pay a differential 
tax; 1 and, on the morrow of the Peninsular Jews’ settlement in the 
Ottoman Empire, these texts of Islamic holy writ had duly saved the 
lives of the Ottoman Padishah’s Christian subjects when their citation 
by the Oecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, at the suggestion of 
the Shcykh-el-Islam, had deterred Sultan Selim I the Grim from taking 
a leaf out of their Spanish Catholic Majesties’ book by unlawfully con¬ 
fronting his non-Jewish ra'iyeh with the inhuman choice between con¬ 
version to Islam and death. 1 

This toleration of ‘the People of the Book’, which was secured de jure 
for Jews and Christians in Dar-al-Isl 5 m, was, of course, accorded de 
facto to Jews in Christendom as a rule;* and indeed it would have been 
almost prohibitively illogical and invidious for the adherents of a younger 
religion to proscribe the practice of an older religion which, according 
to the innovators’ own doctrine, had likewise been revealed to Mankind 
by the One True God to prepare the way for the definitive revelation 
which the younger religion claimed to embody. 4 By a fortunate chance s 
the toleration of ‘the People of the Book’ had been expressly enjoined 
in the scriptures of an Islam whose adherents might otherwise perhaps 
have been tempted into intolerance by their religion’s militant and 
domineering 6thos. Conversely it might perhaps have been expected 
a priori that the absence of any corresponding injunction in the New 
Testament would have been more than made good by the gentle and 
unaggressive ethos of Christianity. The New’ Testament had nothing to 
say about matters of public policy because the Primitive Christians, un¬ 
like the Primitive Muslims, were the submissive subjects and not the 

1 See II. ii. 245; IV. iv. 225-6 and 630; and V. v. 674, n. 2. 

2 See V. v. 706, n. 1, and V. vi. 204-5. 

3 The de facto toleration accorded to the Jew* in Christendom was accorded in Dar-al- 
Islim to the Zoroastrians and the Hindus through a tacit conferment on them of the 
statu# expressly guaranteed to the Jews and the Christians by the Qur’fln. 

* This chronological consideration explains why it was that the Christians tolerated 
Judaism but not Islam, whereas the Muslims tolerated both Judaism and Christianity. 
Dr. James Parkes here notes that the Christian, as well as the Islamic, Church found a 
juridical basis for the toleration that it practised. While the Christian Church held that 
the divine authority previously attaching to Judaism had been entirely abrogated by 
the Incarnation, it nevertheless discovered two grounds for conceding that the Jews in 
Christendom’s midst had a right to a continuing survival. In their latter-day distressed 
condition they were serving as witnesses to the heinousness of the crime of deicide, and 
their survival was guaranteed by St. Paul's assurance that Jewry would be converted in 
the fullness of time (see, for example, Rom. x. and xi). In making these findings, 
Theology was playing the beau role of serving as the handmaid of Mercy and Loving¬ 
kindness. 

5 The inclusion of any particular ruling in the Medinese stirahs of the Qur’an must 
be held to be a matter of chance, since these surahs were a collection of ad hoc rulings 
elicited by the day-to-day business that came on to Muhammad’s agenda in his political 
role of podesta (to give him the title that this imported dictator would have borne if 
Medina had been a Medieval Italian city-state). 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 283 
masterful rulers of a state. 1 Why was it that the Christians, when they 
eventually came into political power, distinguished themselves so 
disadvantagcously from their Muslim contemporaries by abusing this 
power in their behaviour towards the Jews? 

One reason was that in the New Testament the Gospel of Love was 
accompanied by a polemical attack on the Pharisees and was consum¬ 
mated by the story of the Passion of Christ; for these two particular 
ingredients in Christianity’s holy writ could be taken by a latter-day 
Christian, who had the perverse will so to believe, as evidence that he was 
warranted by the New Testament itself in refusing to give the Jews the 
benefit of a Christian’s general obligation to love and cherish his fellow 
human beings. In persuading the Roman authorities to put the founder 
of the Christian Church to death, the Jews in Christian eyes had com¬ 
mitted a capital offence which was also an unspeakable impiety on the 
assumption that the Jews were grievously mistaken in rejecting the 
Christians’ claim that the crucified Jesus was an incarnation of the God¬ 
head. Thus, by a tragically ironical peripeteia , a Passion which, according 
to the Christian Church’s theology, was a supreme act of self-sacrifice, 
willed, out of love for Mankind, by a God incarnate in a man who was a 
Jew, could be taken by professing Christians as a justification for perse¬ 
cuting latter-day kinsmen of Jesus’ murderers who were consequently 
kinsmen of Jesus himself; and the animus shown by the Evangelists in 
recording a controversy between Jesus and the Pharisees which was a 
family quarrel within the bosom of Jewry, and indeed within the bosom 
of Pharisaism itself, could incite Jesus’ latter-day Gentile adherents to 
condemn their professed Master’s own religion and community, root 
and branch. 

An historian, observing this deadly recoil on Jewish heads of the 
shedding of Jesus’ blood, might come to the cynical conclusion that, in 
gently submitting to be put to death, at his Jewish fellow countrymen’s 
instigation, by the Roman authorities, Jesus had involuntarily done his 
own people immeasurably greater harm than they had subsequently 
suffered at Muhammad’s Gentile hands when this militant prophet had 
provided for his landless Meccan followers at Medina by instigating the 
massacre and spoliation of the Jewish husbandmen in the Mcdinesc 
oasis. To appear as the embarrassing victims of the Founder of Islam 
was a much less damaging entry in the record of a Jewish diaspora at the 
mercy of a Muslim or a Christian majority than to appear as the execrable 
murderers of the Founder of Christianity. And, after all, had not 
Muhammad made some considerable amends to the rest of Jewry for 
a crime committed by him against the single Jewish community of the 
Banu Qurayzah in the single oasis of Yathrib (trucidati a.d. 627) when, 
on the occasion of his subsequent conquest of the North Arabian Jewish 
oasis of Khaybar (captum a . d . 629), he had given Judaism an abiding 
legal guarantee of toleration under Muslim rule by a less maleficent 
exercise of the same political power that he had misused in dooming the 
Medincsc Jews to destruction? 

However that might be, it was attested by History’ that the ethos of 
1 On this point, s«e III. iii. 466-72. 



z8 4 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

Christianity had not availed to avert from the heads of the Jewish 
diaspora in Western Christendom the catastrophic effects of a provincial 
Western Christian political outlook in which a millet looked like an 
offensive anomaly. This peculiar inhospitality of Western Christendom 
to the Jewish strangers in its midst was aggravated by the peculiar 
course of Western Christendom’s economic and social development. 

The birthplace of the western Society was an outlying tract of the 
Hellenic World where the Hellenic Civilization had broken down at the 
turn of the fourth and fifth centuries of the Christian Era because, on this 
recently and superficially Hellenizcd ground, the- urban culture of 
Hellenism had failed to strike root. The superstructure of urban life 
that had been erected in the western provinces of the Roman Empire on 
primitive agricultural foundations had proved to be an incubus instead 
of a stimulus; 1 and, after this exotic Roman-built superstructure had 
collapsed under its own weight, the West sank back to the same low 
economic level at which it had lain before Hellenism had attempted to 
seed itself beyond the Appennincs or across the Tyrrhene Sea. This 
peculiar economic handicap with which the Western Society started life 
had two consequences which, between them, were bound to make 
trouble. In the first place a nascent Western Christendom was invaded 
by a Jewish diaspora from an urban Syriac World which found an open¬ 
ing for making a livelihood in the West by providing a rustic society 
with that minimum of commercial experience, skill, and organization 
without which even Ruritania could not live, but which Ruritania at that 
early stage of her development was incompetent to provide out of her 
own resources. 2 In the second place the Western Christian Gentiles’ 
very ineptitude in business affairs inspired them with a compelling and 
abiding ambition to become their own Jews by mastering Jewry’s arts— 
for their encounter with the Jewish diaspora, and the spectacle of the 
wealth and power that these aliens gained through the performance of 
an indispensable social service, was one of the experiences that made 
the Western Christians of the Dark Age aware of their economic back¬ 
wardness and eager to overcome it. 

In the course of ages a more and more demonic concentration of 
Western Gentile will-power on this Jewish economic objective came to 
reap a sensational reward. By the twentieth century of the Christian Era 
even the East European rear-guard of the Western peoples’ column of 
route in their long march towards the goal of economic efficiency was 
going through a metamorphosis that had been achieved a thousand years 
earlier by the North Italian and Flemish pioneers in a Western economic 
and social movement that might be called with equal appropriateness 
either ‘Judaization’ or ‘modernization’. In Western history the sign of 
the attainment of this social modernity was the emergence of a Gentile 
bourgeoisie whose field of economic enterprise was the same as the 
Jewish diaspora’s; and the advent in the West of this modem Gentile 
bourgeoisie made for a quarrel there between Gentile and Jew by making 
the Jew seem superfluous to the Gentile and the Gentile seem insatiable 
to the Jew. As soon as the Gentile felt that he was competent to do the 

* See III. iii. 99-100. * See II. ii. 241. 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 285 
Jew’s work, he coveted the Jew’s place for himself in addition to his 
own; and the Jew, on his side, was resentful at the prospect of being 
frozen out of his original niche in an expanding Western economic 
edifice. At a stage at which agriculture had been the staple industry of an 
infant Western Society, the Western Gentiles had taken advantage of a 
majority’s brute power of numbers to monopolize the ownership and 
occupation of the land and had profited doubly by that economic in¬ 
justice to the Jews when this penalized minority—duly responding to the 
challenge of penalization 1 —had made good the Western Society's most 
serious economic deficiency by making something of such modest 
opportunities for commerce as were to be found in a backward agrarian 
economy. And now' the Western Gentiles were bent on driving out of the 
commercial as well as the agricultural field a Jewish diaspork which had 
done the Western World the twofold service of building the West’s 
once exiguous commerce up into a lucrative business and thereby teach¬ 
ing their Gentile neighbours the tricks of a valuable trade. 

The Plot of the Jezoish Tragedy in a Western Christendom 

This economic quarrel between Jews and Western Gentiles ran 
through three acts. In the first act—classically performed in seventh- 
century Visigothia—the Jews were as unpopular as they were indispens¬ 
able, but the ill-treatment which they incurred through their unpopularity 
was usually kept within bounds by the incapacity of their Gentile 
persecutors to fill their places. At this stage the worst that happened to 
the Jews as a rule was to be compelled to hand over to the Gentiles—by 
way of bribes, surtaxes, fines, and qther euphemisms for robbery—a 
substantial portion of the wealth that was perpetually accumulating in 
the Jews’ hands owing to the pre-eminence of their ability in the pursuits 
of trade and finance on which a Gentile majority had constrained them 
to concentrate their energies. The second act opened, in one Western 
country after another, as soon as a nascent Gentile bourgeoisie had 
acquired sufficient experience, skill, and capital of its own to feel itself 
capable of usurping the local Jews’ place; for at that stage—as was 
demonstrated not only in thirteenth-century England and in fifteenth- 
century Spain but in twentieth-century Poland and Hungary—the 
Gentile bourgeois might be tempted to use the pow'er conferred by 
numbers in order to rid themselves by force of long-established Jewish 
predecessors whom they might not have found it so easy to defeat in 
peaceful and honest economic competition. This second act—which 
was as discreditable to the Gentiles as it was tragic for the Jews—was 
followed by a third act in Western countries where the local representa¬ 
tives of a now w’ell-establishcd Gentile bourgeoisie had become such 
past masters in Jewish economic arts that their traditional fear of suc¬ 
cumbing to Jewish competition no longer constrained them to forgo 
the economic advantage of re-enlisting Jewish ability in the service of 
their national economy. 

Modern Western countries in which the Gentile bourgeoisie had 
arrived at this degree of professional self-confidence found it to their 

1 See II. ii. 309. 



286 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES • 
interest to give political asylum and economic opportunity to Jewish 
outcasts from economically more backward Western countries that were 
still in the violently anti-Jcwish second stage of Western relations with 
Jewry. In this spirit the Tuscan Government allowed crypto-Jcwish 
refugees from Spain and Portugal to settle at Leghorn in and after a.d. 
1593 j 1 Holland had already opened her doors to Portuguese crypto- 
Jewish refugees since a.d. 1579;* and England, which in the seven¬ 
teenth century was following hard on Holland’s heels in a race for 
primacy in the West’s now world-wide trade, ventured from a . d . 1655 
onwards to readmit a Jewish diaspora which she had expelled in a.d. 
1290 when a nascent Gentile English bourgeoisie had been ruthlessly 
elbowing its way into Jewry’s ancient preserves. 

A Mirage of Enfranchisement 

The economic enfranchisement of the Jews which followed the 
Modern Western Gentile bourgeoisie’s attainment of its own economic 
maturity was accompanied by a social and political enfranchisement 
which was a consequence of the contemporary religious and ideological 
revolutions in Western Christendom. The outbreak of the Protestant 
Reformation early in the sixteenth century broke the united Christian 
front with which the Jewish diaspora in the West had been faced since 
the conversion to Catholicism of the last surviving local Arian ‘ascen¬ 
dancy’ towards the end of the seventh century; 1 and, though the modern 
fracture in the Western body ecclesiastic conformed to the peculiar 
structure of the Western Society in breaking on vertical and not on 
horizontal lines, it nevertheless bought the Jewish diaspori substantial 
relief. In seventeenth-century Holland and England, for example, the 
Jews were given a welcome not only because they had become useful 
partners instead of formidable competitors in a competent local Gentile 
bourgeoisie’s eyes but also because they were the victims of these 
Protestant Christians’ Catholic Christian enemies. And, when, towards 
the close of the seventeenth century, the Catholic and Protestant peoples 
of a Gentile Western World tacitly agreed to drop the religious bone of 
contention which had been at least the ostensible object of their Wars of 
Religion, the re-establishment of peace between previously contending 
Christian sects this time brought the Jew's a further measure of relief 
from Christian pressure instead of the turn of the screw which the Jews 
had experienced in Visigothia after the ending of the feud there between 
Arian and Catholic Christians in a.d. 587. 

' See II. ii. 244. In planting Peninsular Jewish refugees in Leghorn the Florentines 
were moved by the same combination of economic with political considerations that had 
already led the 'Osmanlis to plant them in Constantinople and Salonica. The 'Osmanlis 
wanted these Jewish immigrants to take the bread out of the mouths of their Greek 
ra'iyih; the Florentines wanted the Jewish settlers at Leghorn to take it out of the 
mouths of the Pisans, whom the Florentines had finally conquered and crushed in a.d. 
1509. The Florentine conquerors of Pisa, like the Ottoman conquerors of Rumelia, 
were concerned not merely to promote the economic welfare of their recently acquired 
empire but to find some way of doing this without thereby creating an opportunity for 
their conquered rivals to recapture a commercial prosperity which had been the source 
of their former political and military power. * Sec ibid. 

3 The Lombards were not converted to a fully orthodox form of Catholicism till a.d. 
698 (see Lot, F: Lei Invasions Germaniques (Paris 1935, Payot), p. 283). 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 287 
The reason for this difference in the consequences for the Jews lay, of 
course, in the difference in the spirit in which the Christians patched up 
their quarrels on these two historic occasions. In sixth-century Visi- 
gothia the peace of the Church had been restored through a conversion 
of the Arians to Catholicism which had left the Jews in the invidious 
position of being the only surviving dissenters; in a seventeenth-century’ 
Western World ecclesiastical peace was restored by a tacit agreement to 
continue to differ without continuing to take this religious difference to 
heart; and a growing indifference to religious issues, which was both 
the cause and the consequence of the damping of a Judaic flame of 
religious fanaticism in the relations between Christian and Christian, 
inevitably had its effect on the traditional attitude of the Christian 
towards the Jew. The diversion of Gentile hearts and minds from applied 
theology to applied science towards the close of the seventeenth century 
was duly followed at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries 
by the official emancipation of the Jews on the social and the political as 
well as the economic plane. On the European Continent this beneficent 
practical application of the Ideas of 1775 and 1789 was propagated from 
Revolutionary France into Germany and Italy by the Napoleonic 
Empire; in the New World it was propagated by the revolutions in 
which the American colonies of Great Britain, Spain, and Portugal 
successively achieved their independence. By a.d. 1914 the official 
emancipation of the Jews on all planes of human activity was a long 
since accomplished fact in all provinces of the Modern Western World 
outside the former territories of the extinct United Kingdom of Poland- 
Lithuania—which, except for Poznan, West Prussia, and Galicia, had 
been included since a.d. 1815 in ‘the Jewish Pale’ of the Russian 

E Thus, on the eve of the First World War, ‘the Jewish problem’ in the 
Western World might have been thought to have found a solution in 
a fusion of the Jewish and Christian communities with one another 
through a union that had been a voluntary- act on both sides instead of 
having been imposed forcibly on the weaker by the stronger party. In a 
bourgeois and secular Modern Western Society in which the now all- 
important field of business activity had been reopened to the Jews on 
equal terms with the Gentiles, while Religion had sunk into being a 
matter of secondary importance or no importance at all, why should not 
the individual Jew become socially uniform with the individual Gentile 
by evolving into a Western bourgeois of the Jewish religious denomina¬ 
tion or of no religious belief or allegiance of any kind ? In the Western 
World in the course of the nineteenth century of the Christian Era the 
process of assimilation on this basis did in fact go very far, and it was 
conceivable that it might have ended in a complete obliteration of the 
historic communal distinction between Jews and Western Christians if 
the process had not been cut short through the sudden and unexpected 
seizure of the Western World by a fresh paroxysm of trouble as severe 
as the previous bout from which it had emerged towards the close of the 
seventeenth century. 1 Nineteenth-century Western hopes of solving 

1 Sec V. vi. 315-16. 



288 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
the Jewish problem, like nineteenth-century Western hopes of abolish¬ 
ing the institution of War, proved in retrospect 1 to have been a delusion; 
and a tragedy which had momentarily looked as if it were a play in three 
acts then entered on a fourth act which was more horrifying than any of 
its three predecessors and which afforded no glimpse of any prospect of 
finality. 

The Fate of the European Jews and the Palestinian Arabs, a . d . 1933-48 

The peculiar horror of this fourth act lay in the unprecedented wicked¬ 
ness of the malefactors and unprecedented sufferings of both innocent 
Jewish victims and an innocent Arab third party. 

On the Gentile actors’ side the German persecution of the Jews in 
Continental Europe in the years a.d. 1933-45 was far more shocking 
than the Spanish and Portuguese persecution of the Jews in the Iberian 
Peninsula in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. While both persecu¬ 
tions had been prompted by economic motives that had been given a less 
disreputable and less self-interested appearance by being cloaked under 
a show of idealism, the medieval Peninsular Christians’ profession of 
zeal for their religion was not so insincere as the modern German Neo- 
Pagans’ profession of zeal for the idolatrous worship of their tribe—as 
was shown by the fact that the Spaniards and Portuguese did genuinely 
enfranchise any Jews who conformed to the practice of Western 
Christianity, whereas the German National Socialists’ racial tribalism 
left a Jew no avenue of escape from being the ‘non-Aryan’ that Nature 
was alleged to have made him. The medieval Iberian Christians, again, 
were naively practising their traditional religion according to their be¬ 
nighted understanding of its precepts, whereas the modern German 
Nazis had deliberately repudiated the humanitarianism that had been 
the cardinal virtue in the moral code of a post-Christian Modern 
Western Enlightenment. 

The full measure of the Nazis’ depravity is not given in the bare 
statistical statement—appalling though these figures are—that, within 
a period of no more than twelve years, they reduced the Jewish popula¬ 
tion of Continental Europe, west of the Soviet Union, from about 6£ 
million to about ij million 1 by a process of mass-extermination which 

* Sec IV. iv. 141-55. 

1 In A.D. 1952 it was not possible to give exact figures based on accurate statistics, and 
it seemed improbable that the necessary information would ever be obtainable. Accord¬ 
ing to The Jewish Year Book, 1947 (London 1948, Jewish Chronicle), pp. 298-9, the 
Jewish population of Germany and the Continental European countries occupied by 
Germany in the Second World War—not including the occupied parts of the Soviet 
Union—was 1,181,600 in April 1946. The American Jetcith Year Book, 1945-6 (Phila¬ 
delphia 1945, Jewish Publication Society of America) docs not attempt to estimate the 

E st-war figures; but vol. xli of the same series, covering the year 1939-40 and pub- 
ned in 1939. Rives, on p. 585, figures amounting to a total of 6,484,499 for the Jewish 
population of the same area. On this showing, the Jews in the area appear to have been 
5,302,899 fewer in 1946 than they had been in 1939; and this figure comes close to the 
estimate of a drop from 6J millions to ij millions in the same area between the same 
dates, which is given by the Board of Deputies of British Jews in The Jeui in Europe, 
their Martyrdom and their Future (London 1945, Woburn House), p. 38. 

. In these calculations there were several possible sources of error. The areas in ques¬ 
tion for a.d. ; 939-40 *nd for A.D. 1946 might not be exactly conterminous; and, in order 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 289 
was so unprecedentedly systematic and cold-blooded that the new word 
‘genocide’ had to be coined to describe what was in effect a new crime. 
In the operation of the dcstructor-plants in which the Nazis’ victims 
were asphyxiated, the maniacal sadism of the men and women in com¬ 
mand was less appalling than the criminal docility of the hundreds and 
thousands of subordinates who duly carried out their monstrous instruc¬ 
tions, and the moral cowardice of the German public, who took good 
care to avoid acquainting themselves with the atrocities that their hus¬ 
bands, sons, and brothers, and even their sisters, wives, and daughters, were 
committing in their name. The moral nadir to which German souls sank 
under the Nazi dispensation is revealed, not only in these murders and 
physical tortures that were perpetrated by German hands, but also in 
the odious precept and example through which pastors and masters 
who were shamefully betraying their trust taught Gentile German 
school-children to make life unbearable for their Jewish schoolfellows 
by the industrious infliction of studied unkindness. 

This moral downfall of one of the leading nations of a Modern Western 
World in the second quarter of the twentieth century of the Christian 
Era shook the foundations of the regime of secular enlightenment on 
which the West had been subsisting for a quarter of a millennium. It 
showed that the gain won by discarding a Judaic Christian fanaticism in 
the reaction against the savagery of the Early Modem Western Wars of 
Religion had been outweighed by the loss suffered through the simultan¬ 
eous smothering of a likewise Judaic Christian love. After this modern 
German exhibition of the volcanic potentialities of an undomesticated 
Original Sin, it was impossible to retain Modern Western Man’s latter- 
day dogmatic belief in the inevitable progress of a secularized Western 
Civilization and in the self-perfectibility of a graceless Human Nature. 
But the Nazi Gentiles’ fall was less tragic than the Zionist Jews’. On the 
morrow of a persecution in Europe in which they had been the victims 
of the worst atrocities ever known to have been suffered by Jews or 
indeed by any other human beings, the Jews’ immediate reaction to their 
own experience was to become persecutors in their turn for the first 
time since a.d. 135—and this at the first opportunity that had since arisen 
for them to inflict on other human beings who had done the Jews no 
injury, but who happened to be weaker than they were, some of the 
wrongs and sufferings that had been inflicted on the Jews by their 
many successive Western Gentile persecutors during the intervening 
seventeen centuries. In a.d. 1948 some 684,000 out of some 859,000 
Arab inhabitants of the territory in Palestine which the Zionist Jews 

to estimate from the figure for the drop in the Jewish population the figure for the num¬ 
ber of Jews who had been done to death, a statistician would have on the one hand to 
add an unknown number for the losses of the Jewish population in the German-occupied 
territories of the Soviet Union, and on the other hand to allow for a number of survivors 
who, by April 1946, had already migrated from Germany and the ex-German-occupied 
countries since VE-Day. Allowing for these unknown quantities, it might be estimated 
that at least five million Continental European Jews had been done to death by the Nazis 
from first to last. In Dr. James Parkes’ opinion—communicated to the writer on the 
28th February, 1951, in a comment on this footnote—an estimate of six million, in round 
numbers, would be nearer the mark for the figure by which the Jewish population of 
Continental Europe, including the Soviet Union, had been reduced since the outbreak 
of the War of A.D. I 939 ~ 45 * 

B 2399 . vm 


L 



290 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
conquered by force of arms in that year lost their homes and property 1 
and became destitute ‘displaced persons’. 2 

If the heinousness of sin is to be measured by the degree to which the 
sinner is sinning against the light that God has vouchsafed to him, the 
Jews had even less excuse in a.d. 1948 for evicting Palestinian Arabs from 
their homes than Nebuchadnezzar and Titus and Hadrian and the 
Spanish and Portuguese Inquisition had had for uprooting, persecuting, 
and exterminating Jews in Palestine and elsewhere at divers times in the 
past. In a.d. 1948 the Jews knew, from personal experience, what they 
were doing; and it was their supreme tragedy that the lesson learnt by 
them from their encounter with the Nazi German Gentiles should have 
been not to eschew but to imitate some of the evil deeds that the Nazis 
had committed againt the Jews. 1 On the Day of Judgement the gravest 

1 The figure 859,000 is the estimate of the total non-Jewiah population, on the 31st 
December, 1946, of the territory subsequently occupied by Israel within the boundaries 
of the i*t May, 1949, which is given in the Final Report of the United Nations Economic 
Survey Mission for the Middle East, Part I, The Final Report and Appendices (Lake 
Success, N.Y. 1949, United Nations), p. 22, col. a. In the same place the total number of 
refugees from Israeli-held territory at the date of the Report is estimated at 726,000, 
on the reckoning that the non-Jcwish population then still in Israel amounted to 133,000. 
The figure of 604,000 refugees, given on page 289, above, is based on a reckoning by 
Dr. James Parkcs that, by January 1951, the number of the non-Jcwish population 
in Israel had risen to about 175,000—presumably in consequence of a repatriation of 
some 42,000 of the Palestinian Arab 'displaced persons’. 

2 While the direct responsibility for this calamity that overtook the Palestinian Arabs 
in a.d. 1948 was on the heads of the Zionist Jews who seized a Lebensraum for themselves 
in Palestine by force of arms in that year, a heavy load of indirect, yet irrepudiable, 
responsibility was on the heads of the people of the United Kingdom; for the Jews would 
not have had in a.d. >948 the opportunity to conquer an Arab country in which they had 
amounted to no more than an inconsiderable minority in a.d. 1918 if, during the inter¬ 
vening thirty years, the power of the United Kingdom had not been exerted continuously 
to make possible the entry of Jewish immigrants into Palestine contrary to the will, 
in despite of the protests, and without regard to the forebodings of Arab inhabitants of 
the country w’ho in a.d. 1948 were duly to become the victims of this long pursued 
British policy. See further pp. 303-6, below. 

* The cold-blooded systematic ‘genocide’ of several millions of human beings in ex¬ 
termination camps, which had been the worst of the Nazis’ crimes against the Jews, had 
no parallel at all in the Jews’ ill-treatment of the Palestinian Arabs. The evil deeds 
committed by the Zionist Jews against the Palestinian Arabs that were comparable to 
crimes committed against the Jews by the Nazis were the massacre of men, women, and 
children at Dayr Yasin on the oth April, 1948, which precipitated a flight of the Arab 
population, in large numbers, from districts within range of the Jewish armed forces, 
and the subsequent deliberate expulsion of the Arab population from districts conquered 
by the Jewish armed forces between the 15th May, 1948, and the end of that year— 
e.g. from ‘Akki in May, from Lydda and Ramlah in July, and from Bccrsheba and West¬ 
ern Galilee in October. When Nazareth was captured in July, most of the population 
seems to have been allowed to stay. On the other hand, the Arabs who were expelled 
from ‘Akki in May included refugees from Haifa, and those who were expelled from 
Lydda and Ramlah in July included refugees from Jaffa, in addition to the local Arab 
population. The massacre and the expulsions, between them, were responsible for the 
exile of all those Palestinian Arab 'displaced persons’ (to use the current euphemism), 
from the territory conquered by the Israelis, who fled from or were driven from this 
territory after the 9th April, 1948. The expulsions seem to have accounted for about 
284,000 out of the total of about 684,000 Palestinian Arabs who became 'displaced 
persons' from first to last, including those who had already been evacuated by the 
British mandatory authorities or had already fled on their own initiative or had already 
lost their homes as a result of military operations between the outbreak of hostilities 
in Palestine in December 1947 and the massacre of the 9th April, 1948. 

The Arab blood shed on the 9th April. 1948, at Dayr Yasin was on the heads of Irgun; 
the expulsions after the x$th May, 194S, were on the heads of all Israel. 

If, on behalf of Israel, it were to be pleaded that these Jewish outrages in a.d. 1948, 
even reckoned pro rata, were dwarfed in quantity, as well as in heinousness, by the Nazi 
atrocities in a.d. 1933*45. would have to be taken into account, on the other side, 




THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 291 
crime standing to the German National Socialists’ account might be, not 
that they had exterminated a majority of the Western Jews, but that 
they had caused the surviving remnant of Jewry to stumble. The Jews 
in Europe in a.d. 1933-45 had been the vicarious victims of the Germans’ 
resentment over their military defeat at the hands of their Western 
fellow Gentiles in the war of a.d. 1914-18; the Arabs in Palestine in a.d. 
1948 became in their turn the vicarious victims of the European Jews’ 
indignation over the ‘genocide’ committed upon them by their Gentile 
fellow Westerners in a.d. 1933-45. This impulse to become a party to 
the guilt of a stronger neighbour by inflicting on an innocent weaker 
neighbour the very sufferings that the original victim had experienced 
at his stronger neighbour’s hands was perhaps the most perverse of all 

I the base propensities of Human Nature; 1 for it was a wanton endeavour 

to keep in perpetual motion the sorrowful wheel of Karma z to which 
Adam-Ixion was bound and from which only Love and Mercy could 
ever release him. 

The tidal wave that overwhelmed the Palestinian Arabs in a.d. 1948 
was a backwash from an upheaval in the relations between Gentiles and 
Jews in Western longitudes beyond the Palestinian Arabs’ horizon; 3 and 
its catastrophic effect on these innocent strangers’ fortunes was a conse¬ 
quence of the third of the three peculiarities that have been attributed 
i in an earlier passage of this chapter to the Modern Western Civilization. 4 

In a Modern Western Society that had come to overshadow all the rest of 
Mankind, even an imperfectly and precariously emancipated Jewish 
diaspora in the West had become a power in the World through becom¬ 
ing an effective force in the political life of potent Western countries; 
and, in consequence, the West’s unsolved domestic Jewish problem had 
become fraught with perils for non-Western and non-Jewish peoples 
who had nothing to do with this Western problem except for being in 
1 the Westerners’ power. The contemporary unsolved domestic Jewish 

problem of the Islamic World in the Yaman and the Maghrib was 
without effect on the fortunes of any third party because in the twentieth 
century the Islamic Society was impotent to discharge its own debts at 
any third party’s expense; but in that age there was no power on Earth 
strong enough to say nay to the Western Society when the Western 


that the Jews had had much more experience than the Germans had had of the sufferings 
that they were inflicting. If the Nazis were debarred from filing the plea that they knew 
not what they did, the Israelis were debarred a fortiori. 

* This was, of course, a propensity of Human Nature under all veneers, and not just 
of Human Nature under the veneer of Judaism or Germanism. Historic examples of it 
in which the perpetrators had been non-German Gentiles were the French acts of 
aggression against the Italians in a . d . 1494 and against the Syrians in a . d . >920. In 
inflicting a sixty-five years' war (eertbatur a . d . 1494-1559) on Italy the French were 
taking their revenge for a hundred years’ war (gerebatur a.d. 1337-1451) that had pre¬ 
viously been inflicted on France not by the Italians but by the English. In invading and 
occupying Syria in a.d. 1920 the French were taking their revenge for an occupat ion of 
French soil in a . d . 19:4 in which the invaders had been not the Syrians but the Germans. 

2 Sec V. v. 427-9 and 432-3. 

3 In a.d. 1948 the Palestinian Arabs might aptly have applied to the calamity that over¬ 
took them in that year the words that had fallen so quaintly from Neville Chamberlain's 
lips on the 27th September, 1938. 'How horrible, fantastic, incredible’ it must have 
seemed to them that they should have lost their homes 'because of a quarrel in a far¬ 
away country between people of whom’ they knew 'nothing'. 

* Sec p. 277, above. 




2 9 z ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
victors in the War of a.d. 1939-45 chose to compensate the Western 
Jews for the crimes committed against them by a defeated Western 
belligerent at the expense, not of the guilty West, but of an innocent 
non-Wcstern people. In its impotence to resist this injustice the rest of 
Mankind could only marvel at Western Man’s attempt to obtain absolu¬ 
tion for a Western sin by imposing a proportionate penance on strangers 
who were not implicated in the guilt. 

Causes of the Failure of Enfranchisement 

This fourth act of the drama in which the Modern West and Jewry 
were the dramatis personae was indeed in all respects so disconcertingly 
tragic that the historian cannot refrain from seeking to discover the 
points at which an apparently promising third act had gone wrong. 

One vulnerable point was, of course, the survival of a psychological 
barrier between Western Gentiles and Jews after the juridical barrier 
between them had been officially removed. In a nineteenth-century 
soi-disant Liberal Western World there was still an invisible ghetto with¬ 
in which the Western Gentile continued to confine the Jew, and the 
Jew, on his side, continued to segregate himself from the Western 
Gentile. The nominally emancipated Jew found himself still being 
excluded—unavowedly yet effectually—from social opportunities and 
amenities by his Gentile professed fellow members in an officially 
united society, while the Gentile found himself still faced by a free¬ 
masonry—likewise as effectual as it was unavowed—among Jews who 
were eager to claim, without being willing to accord, the benefits that 
ought to have accrued equally to all members of both these two ci-devant 
millets as a result of their official Gleichschaltung. In fact, either party 
continued to observe a double standard of behaviour—a higher standard 
for dealing with members of its own crypto-community and a lower 
standard for dealing with nominal fellow citizens on the other side of a 
supposedly no longer existent social pale—and this new coat of hypo¬ 
crisy embalming the old vice of inequity made cither party more con¬ 
temptible, as well as less formidable, in the other’s eyes and thereby 
made the situation more exasperating, as well as less onerous, for both 
parties. 

This immediate aftermath of Jewish emancipation in the West was 
ironically disappointing; and, though a substantial improvement in 
relations had in fact nevertheless been secured, the precariousness of 
this was revealed by the recrudescence of Antisemitism in a nineteenth- 
century and a twentieth-century Western World wherever there was any 
appreciably rapid increase in the numerical ratio of the Jewish to the 
Gentile ingredient in the local population. This tendency was discernible 
by the year a.d. 1914 in London and in New York as a result of Jewish 
immigration since a.d. 1881 from the former dominions of the extinct 
United Kingdom of Poland-Lithuania under pressure of Russian- 
instigated persecution; 1 and after a.d. 1918 it became virulent in 

* 'In a couple of decades the Jewish population of the United States rose from less 
than a quarter of a million to more than a million; that of England from less than a 
hundred thousand to nearly a quarter of a million; while France, Holland, and Germany 
each received between twenty and twenty-five thousand of these refugees. The new- 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 293 
German Austria and the German Reich as a result of further Jewish 
immigration from Galicia, ‘Congress Poland’, and the more easterly 
provinces of ‘the Pale’ during the First World War . 1 

These symptoms revealed a state of affairs that was not only dis¬ 
appointing but dangerous, yet a warrantable disappointment and 
apprehension gave no reasonable grounds for despondency; for it was 
one of the well-recognized limitations of Human Nature that human 
souls should take time in adjusting themselves emotionally to innova¬ 
tions which the Reason had endorsed by a stroke of the legislator’s pen; 
and, if the Jewish problem in the Western World could have been in¬ 
sulated from its contemporary Western ideological setting, Time would 
have been on the side of an eventual solution of the problem de facto 
when once it had been solved de jure —as was shown by the progressive 
increase in the frequency of intermarriage between Western Gentiles and 
Jews, which was an approximate current index of the progress towards 
a de facto solution that was being achieved. Unhappily this beneficent 
process of assimilation between individual Western Gentiles and Jews, 
which offered the best hope of a solution of the Jewish problem in the 
peculiar ideological environment of the Western social tradition, was 
overtaken and upset by the eruption of a Modern Western Nationalism 
and by the social devastation which this ideological catastrophe brought 
in its train. 

Modern Western Nationalism attacked the Jewish diaspork in the 
Western World on two flanks simultaneously. It led the Western Jews 
by its attractiveness and at the same time drove them by its pressure to 
invent a Jewish nationalism alia Franca . 1 which might be described as a 
collective form of Westernization in contrast to the individual form 
associated with a pre-nationalistic Liberal Western dispensation . 5 Like 
the Westernizing ideal of turning the individual Jew into a Western 
bourgeois of Jewish religion, the alternative Westernizing ideal of turn- 

comers were unlike any Jews whom the West had seen for centuries .. . and their great 
numbers, coupled with the suspicion of their neighbours, intensified their clannishness 
and the difficulty of the simplest political, social, and economic assimilation’ (Parkes, J.: 
The Jeuish Problem in the Modern World, ist American cd. (New York 1946, Oxford 
University Press), pp. 67-68). 

1 The Antisemitism displayed by Gentiles in Poland, Hungary, and Rumania after 
a.d. 1918 was not, of course, due to a change in numerical ratios, for in these countries 
migration had relieved the pressure of Jewish numbers on Gentile susceptibilities in 
proportion to the increase of the same pressure in Austria, Germany, Great Britain, and 
the United States. The explanation of the inter-war phenomena in Eastern Europe was 
not statistical but historical. In a.d. 1918 the Western countries west of 'the Pale' were 
all in Stage Three, at which a now well-established Western Gentile bourgeoisie had 
felt themselves able to grant the Jews a dejure (albeit precarious) emancipation. By con¬ 
trast, the Western Gentile bourgeoisie in Poland and Hungary’ at that date were still in 
the militant Stage Two, in which they were aspiring to become their own Jews and were 
seeking to clear an economic Lebensraunt for themselves by elbowing the Jews out of 
their way, while the Westernizing Gentile population of Rumania (at least in the Rcgat, 
as distinct from Transylvania) was still in Stage One, at which the Jewish practitioners 
of the higher arts of economic life were as obnoxious to the Gentiles as they were in¬ 
dispensable to them. In German Austria and Germany a fear of falling back out of 
Stage Three into Stage One, as a result of the economic catastrophe precipitated there 
by the First World War, no doubt partly accounted for the virulence of the recrudescence 
of Antisemitism in those two economically advanced Western countries by comparison 
with the relative mildness of the contemporary symptoms in the United Kingdom and 
the United States. 

* This convenient Italian phrase signified 'in the Western style’ in Ottoman parlance. 

1 See II. ii. 2:2-14, 



294 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
ing the oecumenical Jewish millet into a parochial nation (concentrated, 
Western-fashion, within the frontiers of a national territory with an 
exclusively and homogeneously Jewish population) was evidence that 
the emancipation of a Western Jewry in the nineteenth century of the 
Christian Era had been genuine enough to expose the Western Jews, for 
the first time in the history of their relations with their Gentile neigh¬ 
bours, to the influence of current Western ideas and ideals. At the same 
time, Zionism, on the testimony of Theodor Herzl himself, was also 
evidence of an anxiety, in nineteenth-century Western Jewish souls, 
lest the avenue of individual assimilation, which had previously been 
opened up to Western Jews by the advent of a Modern Western Gentile 
Liberalism, might be closed to them again by the onset of a Modern 
Gentile Nationalism that was treading hard on Liberalism’s heels . 1 

The last quarter of the nineteenth century of the Christian Era wit¬ 
nessed a recrudescence of Antisemitism in the Western World that was 
as ominous as it was unexpected. In point of numbers the greatest blow 
dealt to a Western Jewry in this generation was the instigation of 
pogroms in ‘the Pale’ by a Russian Tsardom in extremis which resorted 
to this base exped ient in and after a .d. 1881 2 in the futile hope of diverting 
the hostility of its Gentile subjects from its own head on to the heads of 
their Jewish neighbours. 3 Yet this fresh outbreak of persecution in the 
backward eastern fringes of the Western World on the initiative of a 
non-Western regime was not so alarming a portent as the contemporary 
symptoms in Germany and France. The first explosion of Antisemitism 
in a latter-day Germany (saeviebat aj>. 1873-96) was a flash in the pan. 4 
The Dreyfus Affair (saeviebat a.d. 1894-1906), to which a Liberal France 
succumbed in the hour of her demoralization after her defeat by Germany 
in a.d. 1870-r, was more deeply disturbing. 5 The spectacle of anti- 
Jewish demonstrations in Paris at the time when the battle over the 
Dreyfus case was being fought out in France was the experience that 
converted the Austrian Jewish journalist Theodor Herzl from being an 
ardent assimilationist into becoming the Apostle of Zionism. 6 

It is perhaps no accident that a nineteenth-century Jewish Zionism and 
a twentieth-century German Neo-Antisemitism should have arisen 
successively in the same geographical zone of the Western World, and 
that this locus should have been the German-speaking territories of the 
Austrian Empire just west of the domains of the Hungarian Crown of 
St. Stephen and the former United Kingdom of Poland-Lithuania. 
This Austrian zone lay sufficiently far to the west for its Jewish inhabi¬ 
tants to be subject to infection by current Western ideologies—including 
Nationalism as well as Liberalism—in a Modern Western Liberal Age, and 
sufficiently far to the east for its Gentile inhabitants to be no less subject 

1 See IV. iv. 163. 2 See p. 292, above. 

* See Parkcs, op. cit., chap. 4, especially pp. 62-66. 

* See Parkcs, op. cit., pp. 42-44. * See Parke*, op. cit., pp. 35-39. 

6 See Parkes, op. cit., p. 89. In a comment on the first draft of the present chapter of 
this Study, the same Western Christian Gentile student of Jewish history put in the 
following words the dilemma with which the Jewish diaspori in the West found itself 
confronted in Herd's generation: ‘Western nationalism fundamentally made Jewish 
assimilation impossible. The tragedy was implicit in the Jews’ position, not in the Jews' 
choice of Nationalism. Whichever line they adopted offered them a tragic solution.’ 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 295 
to infection by pre-Liberal Western ideologies still persisting among the 
backward Gentile populations of the adjoining ‘Pale’ after the dawn of 
Liberalism farther west; and the notion that the Western Jews might 
win for themselves, by adopting Western Nationalism, an asylum which 
they might prove not to have secured through a conversion to Western 
Liberalism would naturally present itself to the minds of Austrian 
Jews whose nineteenth-century status of individual emancipation was 
threatened by the simultaneous onsets of a Modern Gentile Nationalism 
from Western Europe and a Medieval Gentile Antisemitism from ‘the 
Pale ’. 1 

Inherent Consequences of the Captivation of the Jews by a Modem Western 
Gentile Nationalism 

A Modern Western Gentile Nationalism, with its medieval objective 
of self-imposed ghettos for all peoples, was an exaggeration, amounting 
to a caricature, of the traditional Western ideal of the homogeneous 
single-community parochial state; but, in this archaistic Modern 
Western ideology’s North American and West European birthplaces, 
its devastating effects were mitigated by the circumstance that in these 
countries Nationalism was virtually a consecration of the existing state of 
the map. In France and other Western countries on both shores of the 
Atlantic towards the close of the eighteenth century, the populations 
actually were distributed in locally homogeneous blocks approximately 
corresponding to the territories of existing sovereign states; and, though, 
as the mania of Nationalism progressively travelled eastwards—infecting 
first the eastern parts of the Western World and thereafter the domains 

of divers living non-Western societies—it was successively attacking 
countries where the contemporary cartographical facts were more and 
more sharply at variance with the nationalistic ideal, it was not till it 
attacked the Western Jewish diaspora that it came to affect a community 
whose contemporary geographical distribution and political allegiance 
afforded Nationalism no vestige whatsoever of a basis in the realm of 
existing facts. 

The alien converts to this Modern Western Nationalism whose pre¬ 
dicament came nearest to being like that of the Jews were the Armenians; 
yet even the Armenians differed from the Jews in having continuously 
preserved, into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a remnant of an 
ancestral territory in which they were still the local cultivators of the 
soil. While the latter-day Jewish and Armenian diasporas were remark¬ 
ably similar to one another in geographical distribution, economic 
occupation, communal organization, and psychological attitude, there 
was no element in a latter-day Jewry corresponding to the autochthon¬ 
ous Armenian peasantry of Van, Erivan, and the Qarabagh; and, in the 
light of the consequences of the impact of Nationalism on the Armenians, 
this difference in the situation of the Armenian and the Jewish people in 
the twentieth century had a bearing on Jewry’s prospects. In the fortunes 

1 The Antisemitic Chrislian-Social leader Karl Lueger was elected Burgomaster of 
Vienna in October >895, and was allowed by the Emperor Francis Joseph to assume 
office in March 1897 after he hid been re-elected no less than four times against the 
Emperor’s veto.—Parkes, op. tit., p. 49. 



296 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
of the Armenian diaspora the impact of Nationalism had spelled tragedy; 
for the adoption of the Western ideal of Nationalism by an Armenian 
diaspora that was everywhere in a minority had threatened the non- 
Armenian majority among whom they were dispersed with the alter¬ 
native calamities of subjugation or eviction, and this menaced majority 
had safeguarded its own future by the barbarous method of wiping the 
Armenian diaspora off the map in the successive massacres and deporta¬ 
tions of which the Armenians were the victims in the Ottoman Empire 
between a.d. 1896 and a.d. 1922. In this catastrophe which their conver¬ 
sion to Nationalism had brought upon them, the Armenian people were 
saved from complete extinction thanks to their having preserved a parcel 
of territory in which they had never ceased to constitute a majority of the 
local population; and the generation that saw the destruction of the 
Armenian diaspora in Turkey also saw the establishment of a miniature 
Armenian national state in the shape of the Republic of Erivan within 
the framework of the Soviet Union. 

This Armenian experience illustrated a simple law of Nationalism 
which was manifest to historians though it had been ignored by national¬ 
ists. The destructiveness of Nationalism was proportionate to the degree 
of the discrepancy between the ideal of Nationalism and the local state 
of existing geographical and political facts. Even in the ci-devant British 
colonies in North America, where the discrepancy was at a minimum 
at the date of the Revolutionary War, it was nevertheless sufficiently 
serious to make itself grievously felt in the expulsion of the United 
Empire Loyalists. 1 The enormously greater devastation caused by the 
impact of Nationalism on the Armenians was proportionate to the 
enormously greater degree of the discrepancy in that case. What was to 
be the outcome of the impact of Nationalism on the Jews, in whose case 
the discrepancy was at its maximum? By the time when Zionism was 
inaugurated in the nineteenth century of the Christian Era, more than 
seventeen hundred years had passed since the last date at which there 
had been any territory continuously inhabited by a compact Jewish 
agricultural population corresponding to the Armenian peasantry in 
the neighbourhood of Erivan. The Jews had had no living homeland 
of the kind since a.d. 135, when the last roots of Jewry in Judaea had 
been pulled out of the soil by the Romans. 2 What practical applications 
of the Modern Western ideal of Nationalism were open to a people in 
this historical plight? 

In theory, Jewish nationalists alia Franca had a choice between two 
alternatives. Their objective of providing Jewry w’ith a country which 
would be ‘as Jewish as England’ was ‘English’ 1 could be attained either 
by colonizing some no-man’s-land in ‘the great open spaces’, which had 

1 See IV. iv. 165-7. 

* Dr. James Parkes comments: 

‘When the last roots of Jewry were pulled up in the hills of Judaea, substantial 
communities remained across the Jordan, around the fringes and in the plains, and a 
relatively compact and by that time more numerous Jewish community in Galilee was 
almost untouched. The Galilean patriarchate exercised certain political and religious 
powers over Jews elsewhere right up to A.D. 435. This is the date of the disappearance 
of anything which could be called a Jewish government [in Palestine).’ 

1 A phrase quoted by Sir W. Churchill in his memorandum of the 3rd June, 1922. 




THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 297 
been opened up through Western pioneering enterprise, or alternatively 
by supplanting the Gentile inhabitants of such parts of Palestine as had 
been inhabited by Jews before a.d. 135. The second of these two alterna¬ 
tive possible programmes was beset with difficulties, moral as well as 
material. It required the eviction of an existing population which, by the 
year a.d. 1897, when Theodor Her2l inaugurated the Zionist Movement, 
must be reckoned to have been at home in Palestine for more than 
seventeen and a half centuries, since the most recent drastic change in 
the composition of the population of Palestine had taken place as far 
back as the morrow of the suppression, in a.d. 135, 1 of the last Jewish 
insurrection against the Roman Imperial Government, when there had 
been a systematic colonization of the previously Jewish-inhabited dis¬ 
tricts of Palestine by Gentile settlers from other parts of the Roman 
Empire. 2 

Even if it were to be assumed—though this assumption would be un¬ 
warrantable—that the subsequent population included no elements that 
had been there before the second century of the Christian Era, this 
latter-day population's tenancy of its Palestinian home would still have 
been longer, by at least a hundred years, than the previous tenancy of 
the same parts of Palestine by the Children of Israel and Judah—on 
the assumption that these too had not incorporated any elements from 
an earlier population—even at the longest reckoning of the interval 
between the entry of the Israelites in the course of a post-Minoan 
Volkenvandcrung in the days of the New Empire of Egypt and the evic¬ 
tion of the Jews by the Romans in a.d. 70 and a.d. 135.* A similar 

1 The subsequent change that had followed the Primitive Muslim Arab conquest of 
Palestine in a.d. 636-7 had been not only much less abrupt but also probably smaller 
even in the aggregate. The Arabs who had seeped into Palestine gradually in the course 
of the next i ,260 years had made Palestine a wholly Arabic-speaking country by convert¬ 
ing much more than by supplanting the pre-existing population. 

* See Spruner, K., and Menke, Th.: Atlas Ar.tiquus, 3rd ed. (Gotha 1862, Perthes), 
Plate No. xxvi, the central map: 'Syria Phoenicc, Syria Palaestina Provinciac ab Aerac 
Christianae Anno 70 usque ad Oiocletiani Tcmpus.’ 

1 Dr. James Parkes comments: 

‘I do not believe that the argument about changes of tenancy is valid. There is no 
moment in Palestinian history’ when, over the whole or a large part of the country, there 
was a sudden change of population. Many who think of themselves as Arabs to-day had 
ancestors who had been at one time heathen or “Canaanites”, and later Jews, and then, 
probably, Christians (after Justinian). There is an unchanging core of indefinable size, 
and there are accretions of every century. Certainly there were far more Jews in the 
country for at least a century after the Arab conquest than there were "Arabs” or “Mus¬ 
lims”; and, when the majority became Muslim and Arabic-speaking, it is probable that 
more were ex-Jews and ex-Christians than newly-arrived “Arabs”, though there must 
have been a considerable number of the latter, especially after good government passed 
and allowed increasing badawi encroachment.’ 

This comment, with which the writer of this Study entirely agreed (see p. 207. n. x, 
above), moved him to add a comment of his own. In his personal opinion the title of the 
population of Palestine or any other country to be left in the undisturbed possession of 
their homes rested on the human rights of the living generation, and its validity did not 
depend on the production of evidence prosing that the living generation’s ancestors had 
been in situ for this or that number of centuries. If, however, the question of the legiti¬ 
macy of the title of the non-Jewish population inhabiting Palestine during the half 
century a.d. 1897-1948 were to be argued on the (in the writer’s opinion) more academic 
ground of length of ancestral tenure, then evidently the historical facts cited by Dr. 
Parkes in his comment and agreed with him by the present writer would make the pre- 
Zionist population’s title overwhelmingly strong ; for, on this showing, the living genera¬ 
tion of this population were the descendants, heirs, and representatives not merely of 
the Arabs who had seeped in since the conquest of Palestine by the Primitive Muslim 

L 2 


B 2888. VXXI 


2 9 S ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
eviction of the population by which Palestine was inhabited at the close 
of the nineteenth century, and by which it continued to be inhabited 
down to the year a.d. 1948, could be achieved only by an act of military 
aggression, at the existing population’s expense, such as had been com¬ 
mitted by the wild tribesmen of Israel and Judah when they had origin¬ 
ally broken into Palestine from the Arabian Desert, and by the Minoan 
Philistines and Western Christian Crusaders when they had broken in 
from the Mediterranean seaboard. Such aggression would be militarily 
and politically difficult to commit so long as Palestine remained within 
the Ottoman Empire and until Zionism obtained the backing of a pre¬ 
ponderant group of Western Powers; and, under all military and political 
conditions, it would be morally difficult to defend in a world in which the 
progress of technology was making the scourge of war so prohibitively 
severe that aggression was coming to be recognized for the crime that 
it always had been. It would likewise be morally difficult for Zionists 
to justify in the eyes, not only of the Gentiles, but also of the traditionally 
orthodox Jews of the quietist school known as Agudath Israel . 1 


Inherent Consequences of Zionism's Departure from a Traditional Jewish 
Practice of Political Quietism 

While a confident expectation of the eventual return of a surviving 
diaspora of Jewry and a vanished diaspora of Israel to their previous 
homes in Palestine was a fundamental tenet of orthodox Judaism which 
had inspired the Jewish diaspora to preserve its communal identity over 
a period of 1,762 years, reckoning back from the inauguration of the 
Zionist Movement in a . d . 1897 to the suppression of Bar Kokaba’s 
messianic insurrection in a . d . 135, the sixty generations of Jews in 
diaspora that had come and gone in the course of that flow of Time had 
persisted in leaving it to Almighty God to carry out on His, and not on 
His Chosen’s People’s, initiative a restoration that all schools of orthodox 
Judaism alike held to be an act that was God’s prerogative. This per¬ 
sistent practice of all post-Hadrianic Jews—orthodox, heretical, agnostic, 
and anti-religious—had been consecrated by Agudath Israel in their 
belief that any fresh recourse to a human initiative for the purpose of 
bringing the restoration ter pass would be an impious usurpation of 
God’s prerogative by human hands. 

In taking this view the Agudath appear to have been a minority 
among the orthodox, and the Mizrachi who embraced Zionism without 
admitting that this was incompatible with orthodoxy could argue that a 
post-Hadrianic practice of refraining from taking political action for 
bringing about the return had been merely prompted by manifest ex- 


Arabs in a.d. 636-7, and not merely of the Hellenic or Hellenizing Gentile colonists who 
had been planted in Palestine in the second century of the Christian Era, but of the Jews 
and the Israelites themselves and of the Israelites' incorporated Canaanite predecessors 
right back to the Mesolithic Natufian fathers of agriculture and the Middle Palaeolithic 
Carmelite cross-breeds between Homo Sapiens and Homo Ntandcrtalensis (see Albright, 
W. F.: The Archaeology of Palestine (Lone Ion 1949. Penguin). pp, 59 and 55). 

1 The attitude of Agudath Israel and the difference between its negative-minded non¬ 
violence and the positive-minded non-violence of Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai’s response 
to the challenge of the fall of Jerusalem in a.d. 70, have been noticed in V. v. 76, 588-9, 
and 617, n. 2, and V. vi. 128. 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 299 

pediency without being enjoined by any generally accepted article of 
Jewish belief. Against the practice of the 1,762 years running back from 
a.d. 1897 to a.d. 135 they could adduce the contrary practice of the 674 
years running back from a.d. 135 to 539 B.c., during which the Jews, 
after having first hailed as their messiah their Gentile liberator Cyrus the 
Achacmenid, had risen again and again, at the call of successive native 
Thcudases and Judases, on the then forlorn hope of restoring an ex¬ 
tinguished kingdom of David by force of Jewish arms. The orthodox 
Jewish converts to a Herzlian Zionism could also argue that, while a 
policy of quietism might, in adverse circumstances, be expedient, a 
policy of activism could never be impious, since another fundamental 
tenet of Judaism was a belief that God works within History and not 
outside it, and gives effect to His will in human affairs by acting through 
divinely inspired human agents. Yet, however cogent the Mizrachi 's 
reply to the Agudath might be, there were difficulties in their position 
likewise. 

These difficulties did not arise in regard to those Gentile militarists 
and empire-builders who, in Jewish belief, had been historic agents of 
the Almighty God of Israel; for, if these Gentiles had indeed played this 
role, they had been signally unaware of the mission which they were 
carrying out. The Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, Seleucid, and Roman war¬ 
lords, whose crushing military superiority might appear, to an un¬ 
enlightened eye, to be the natural explanation of Israel’s and Judah’s 
calamities, remained naively ignorant of the bizarre fact that, in the sight 
of Jewish seers, they had been the unintentional and unconscious agents 
of a One True God 1 who had been employing them, without deigning 
to make them privy to His counsels, to punish His Chosen People for 
their sins with an eye to forgiving and restoring this Chosen People 
when a sufficient experience of suffering should have brought forth 
fruits meet for repentance 1 in Jewish hearts. There was no moral 
ambiguity or ambivalence in the role of an unintentional and unconscious 
agent of God’s act of forgiveness and restoration, for which a Gentile 
Cyrus had been cast by a Jewish prophet ; 3 but what about the subse¬ 
quent Jewish soi-disant messiahs who had claimed the allegiance of their 
fellow Jews on the pretension that they were the Lord’s Anointed? 
How were their fellow Jews to discern whether these professed execu¬ 
tants of God’s will were truly inspired? And, even if they were not 
cynically fraudulent impostors, could they be acquitted of being 
presumptuously arrogant visionaries? Could they be held innocent of 
having taken the divine law into their own human hands ? And was not 
this an act of presumption which was also an act of impiety ? Was not the 
Lord’s repudiation of their claim and disapproval of their action patently 
signified in the heaviness of the disasters which He had invariably 
allowed them to bring upon themselves and upon their deluded 
followers ? And, if this had been God’s judgement on the Theudases and 
Judases, who had never dreamed of disbelieving in God, and who had 
been prompted by a sincere though misguided desire to put God’s will 

« See V. vi. 123-6. * Matt. iii. 8; cp. Luke iii. 8. 

J Deutero-Isaiah xliv. 28 and xlv. 1-4. 



300 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
into effect by hastening the advent of a messianic kingdom which God 
had promised to Judah through His prophets, how was a God-fearing 
Jewry to reconcile itself with a secular Zionist movement that numbered 
agnostics among its leaders, and whose programme had been inspired, 
not by the messianic visions of post-Exilic Jewish prophets, but by the 
blue-prints of a Western Gentile Nationalism whose prophets had been 
a King Louis XI of France, a King Henry VII of England, and the 
Florentine publicist Niccolb Machiavclli ? l 

These theological and moral difficulties in the ideology of Zionism 
were matched by its political awkwardness; for, in deliberately departing 
from the political quietism that had been Jewry’s consistent practice for 
some sixty generations ending in a.d. 1897, it had abandoned a tradi¬ 
tional Jewish attitude that had made Jewry’s survival in diaspora possible 
by inspiring the Jews with an unquenchable hope without confronting 
the Jews’ Gentile successors in Palestine with a standing menace. So 
long as the Jewish diaspora was content bona fide to leave the future of 
Palestine in the hands of God, the existing Christian and Muslim 
inhabitants of the Promised Land could afford to do likewise; and, when 
the orthodox Jewish doctrine of an eventual repatriation of Jewry to 
Palestine through an act of God was thus accompanied by a traditional 
Jewish practice of political quietism, the doctrine—like a derivative 
Christian doctrine of the Second Coming of Christ—could be interpreted 
in crude Machiavellian or Marxian terms as a psychological device, not 
for bringing to pass a ‘far-off divine event to which the whole creation 
moves’, 2 but for maintaining, en attendant ad infinitum, the social cohe¬ 
sion of a mundane community in diaspord. 3 A worldly-minded member 
of the relatively prosperous latter-day Jewish diaspora in the Western 
World west of ‘the Pale’ might accordingly endorse, on grounds of 
present communal self-interest, a traditional belief which an unworldly- 
minded member of a still unemancipated Jewry in ‘the Pale’ would 
cherish as a corollary of his trust in God and his intuition that the true 
end of Man is to glorify and enjoy God for ever. 

It will be seen that Agudath Israel’s religious scruples and the 
Palestinian Arabs’ political anxieties alike could have been reconciled 
with a latter-day Jewish nationalism alia Franca if the Zionists had 
decided to seek a site for the Jewish national state of their dreams, not in 
Palestine, but in some no-man’s-land. In the first chapter of the history 
of Zionism this issue was an open question which was hotly contested. 
It was not till an offer of a site in East Africa had been made by the 
British Government on the 14th August, 1903, and been declined by the 
Seventh Zionist Congress in a . d . 1905 4 that the die was irrevocably cast 
in favour of identifying the goal of latter-day Jewish nationalist en- 

* See II. ii. 252-4 and V. vi. 216. 

1 Tennyson: In Memoriam, Conclusion, Stanza xxxvi. 

1 A deeper and more convincing psychological interpretation of the Jewish and the 
Christian hope might be that both doctrines were myth9, formulated in collective terms, 
of a spiritual pilgrim’s progress through which it was open to the souls of individual 
human beings to return, with God’s help, from an exile in the wilderness of Original 
Sin to a lost paradise of voluntary concordance with the will of their Creator. 

4 Sec Sokolow, N.: History of Zionism, 1600-191S (London 1919, Longmans Green, 
2 vols.), vol. i, pp. 296-7; Stein, L.: Zionism (London 1925, Bcnn), pp. 94-95. 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 301 

deavours with the Palestinian qib/ah of the traditional Jewish religious 
hope. This fateful decision was not dictated a priori by the orthodox 
Jewish tradition. In the hyper-orthodox eyes of Agudath Israel, a Political 
Zionism that had selected the historical Zion as its objective had indeed, 
as we have seen, thereby rendered itself guilty of impiety. The preference 
for Palestine over East Africa was prompted by the spirit of the exotic 
Gentile ideology to which the Zionist Jews had succumbed; for the 
ethos of this Modern Western Nationalism was inveterately archaistic, 1 
and, in opting for Palestine in a.d. 1903-5, the Zionists were acting 
under the inspiration of a Western Gentile Romantic Movement which 
had previously captivated the Gentile peoples round about them. 1 

Archaism, as we have seen in another context, 3 is always a perilous 
pursuit, but it is most perilous of all when it is taken up by members of a 
community that is a fossil relic of a dead civilization, since the Past to 
which the archaists have it in their power to cast back in such a case may 
be more sharply at variance with present realities than even the remotest 
past state of a society belonging to the living generation of the species. 
A Western-inspired archaism carried the twentieth-century Zionist 
faction of a Jewish diaspork back to the aims and ethos of the generation 
of Joshua; and the consequent replacement of the traditional Jewish hope 
of an eventual restoration of Israel to Palestine on God’s initiative, 
through the agency of a divinely inspired Messiah, by a Zionist Move¬ 
ment, working to establish a Jewish national state in Palestine on Jewry’s 
initiative by mundane political and military means, had the same explosive 
effect as the contemporary replacement of the traditional Christian hope 
of an eventual millennium to be inaugurated at the Second Coming of 
Christ by a Communist Movement working to establish a mundane new 
dispensation by means of a world revolution. 

‘When ye shall see the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel 
the Prophet, standing where it ought not (let him that readeth under¬ 
stand), then let them that be in Judaea flee to the mountains. . . . For in 
those days shall be affliction, such as was not from the beginning of the 
creation which God created unto this time.’ 4 

The Effects of the First World War on the Destiny of Palestine 

The calamities which inexorably overtook the Jews in Continental 
Europe and the Arabs in Palestine in the twentieth century of the 
Christian Era were indeed implicit in the decision taken in the nine¬ 
teenth century by a section of the Jewish diaspora in the West when 
they adopted a programme of collective Westernization on the lines of 
the archaistically oriented Modern Western ideal of Nationalism. Yet 
the rise of a Zionist Movement whose objective was a Jewish national 
state in Palestine would not in itself have been capable of producing 

1 The influence of this vein of Archaism in aggravating a Modem Western National¬ 
ism’s devastating effect on the lives of its Ottoman Orthodox Christian converts has 
been noticed on p. 191, n. 2, above. 

* ‘Zionism, in defiance of common-sense but in obedience to a deep-seated instinct, 

declared itself once and for all a movement concerned wholly and solely with Palestine’ 
(Stein, op. cit., p. 95). » In V. si. 49-97. 

* Mark xiii. 14 and 19; Matt. xxiv. 15 and 21; Dan. xi. 31 and xii. xi. 


302 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
these tragic effects if a Gentile Western Society had not fallen into a 
succession of world wars, precipitated by the indigenous nationalism of 
the Gentile Western peoples, for which neither Arabs nor Jews were 
responsible. The outbreak of the First World War struck the fatal spark 
that ignited a fortuitously laid train of gunpowder. 

The first link in a concatenation of inauspicious events was the break¬ 
up of the Ottoman Empire in Asia as a consequence of its intervention 
in the war of a.d. 1914-18 on what proved to be the losing side. Under 
the Ottoman dispensation the Arab population of Palestine had been 
insured against becoming the victims of Zionist ambitions to their 
detriment thanks to the fact that the Muslim majority of the Palestinian 
Arabs was part of the dominant Muslim community in an empire whose 
integrity in Asia had hitherto been preserved substantially intact by an 
interplay between the Ottoman Muslims’ collective strength and an 
international balance of power. 1 Ever since the political control of 
Palestine had passed out of Christian into Muslim hands as a result of 
the Primitive Muslim Arab conquest in the seventh century of the 
Christian Era, Jews had been free to resort to, and reside in, Palestine 
for the purpose of religious exercises and studies; and since a.d. 1882 the 
Ottoman Government had allowed the Zionists to found agricultural 
settlements in the Palestinian country-side on a scale that was modest 
enough to avoid the provocation of any alarm or resentment among the 
Arab inhabitants of the country. 2 This Ottoman safeguard to the rights 
and interests of the Palestinian Arabs was removed by the overthrow of 
the Ottoman imperial rdgime. 

The antecedent overthrow of the Romanov imperial regime in Russia 
—likewise in consequence of defeat in the war of a.d. 1914-18—had 
already removed another of the Palestinian Arabs’ safeguards; for, down 
to a.d. 1914, the Russian people had continued to follow in large numbers 
the traditional Christian practice—long since almost obsolete in the 
West—of going on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and the Russian 
Imperial Government—which had identified itself with the Antisemitism 
of the Western or semi-Westcrnized Christian majority in the popula¬ 
tion of the former United Kingdom of Poland-Lithuania since the lion’s 
share of this vast area had become ‘the Jewish Pale’ of the Russian 
Empire—had been intransigent in vetoing any inclination on the part of 
its Western allies to grant satisfaction to Zionist aspirations in Palestine, 

* This Ottoman insurance policy had cost the Muslim majority of the Palestinian 
Arabs an expensive premium in the shape of military conscription into an Ottoman 
Army in which the rate of mortality—from disease even more than from hostilities— 
had been cruelly high. The Palestinian Arabs’ subsequent fate suggested that it had been 
worth their while to pay even this price for the preservation of their existence. 

* The flow of Jewish emigration from 'the Pale' into Palestine between a.d. 1882 and 
A.D. 19x4 was a mere tricklecompared to ‘the immense stream which flowed into the 
expanding centres of the World’s industry [in the Western countries]’ (Parkea, J.: 
The Jeuiih Problem in the Modern World, 1st American cd. (New York 1946, 
Oxford University Press), p. 66). By the time of the outbreak of war in A.D. 1914, there 
were fifty-nine Jewish agricultural settlements in Palestine with an aggregate population 
of twelve or thirteen thousand. (See the list in Nawratzki, K.: Die Jildiiehe Kolonisation 
Poldstinai (Munich 1914, Reinhardt), Anlagc 18. The figures of inhabitants given in this 
table add up to only 10,105, But the figures for seven settlements arc missing.) The total 
Jewish population of Palestine at the same date numbered about 8o,ooo, out of about 
750,000 Palestinians of all faiths. 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 303 
on the ground that the transformation of Palestine into a Jewish national 
state would desecrate a Holy Land which still meant to Russians all 
that it had once meant to other Christians likewise. The Tsardom fell on 
the 12th March, 1917; the Balfour Declaration was issued on the 2nd 
November of the same year. 

Another political factor which the First World War brought into play 
was a competition between the belligerents in courting the sympathy of 
Jewry. To win Jewish support—and, still more, to avert Jewish hostility 
—was an object of great moment to both sides; for, imperfect though 
the psychological emancipation of the Jewish diaspora in the West may 
still have been at this date, their economic and political emancipation 
had already gone far enough to give Jewry’s suffrages a substantial and 
perhaps decisive weight in a trembling Western balance of international 
power. The Jews were now an appreciable force in the domestic political 
life of the Central and the Western European Powers alike, and of the 
United States to a still greater degree; and the feelings of the American 
Jewish community loomed large in the calculations of European bel¬ 
ligerents who had come to realize that the United States would have the 
last word to speak in a European conflict and that this American last word 
might be influenced appreciably by the views of Jewish American 
citizens. 

In the course of the thirty-six years ending in a . d . 1917 the Jews 
throughout the World had come, with good reason, to look upon Russia 
as being Jewry’s ‘Enemy Number One’, and, in the First World War, 
Germany, as the protagonist on the anti-Russian side whose victorious 
arms had liberated a large part of ‘the Pale* from an Antisemitic Russian 
rule, stood to gain those world-wide Jewish sympathies which the West 
European Powers stood to lose as Russia’s allies. After the German 
Army had pushed the Russian Army back in a.d. 1915 to a line approxi¬ 
mating to the Russo-Polish political frontier of a.d. 1793, the German 
General Staff gave American Jewish journalists opportunities of seeing 
with their own eyes how the Russians had found vent for their rage at 
their shattering defeat at German hands by discharging it on an innocent 
and defenceless Jewish population in the territory that they had been 
forced to evacuate. For the West European Powers—and for the United 
States likewise, as soon as she became their co-belligerent—it was a 
matter of urgency to outmatch this card which Germany had acquired 
through conquering ‘the Pale’, and a trump card had been placed in 
their hands by a British conquest of Palestine which put it in their power 
to offer satisfaction to Zionist aspirations. The Western Powers were 
tantalizingly inhibited from playing this Palestinian card so long as they 
had any hope of keeping their Antisemitic Russian partner in the firing- 
line ; and it is no wonder that the Balfour Declaration was published as 
soon as the last Western hopes of further Russian military collaboration 
had expired. 

Great Britain's Responsibility for the Catastrophe in Palestine 

In taking a measure so well calculated to help them to win a war in 
which they were fighting for their lives, it is comprehensible that the 


30 4 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

Western Powers should not have looked ahead beyond the hoped-for 
achievement of victor}'. They were less blameworthy for making dubious 
commitments concerning Palestine to Jews and Arabs while the First 
World War was still being fought than they were for shirking their 
consequent duty, in the subsequent interval of peace, to face the equivo¬ 
cal situation which they had created in Palestine under the stress of a 
world war and to liquidate it at the earliest possible date with the least 
possible injury and injustice to the parties to whom their war-time com¬ 
mitments had been made. The Western Power that bore the lion’s share 
of the responsibility for the inter-war failure to retrieve the position in 
Palestine was Great Britain, who, first as Occupying Power and then as 
Mandatory, was conducting the administration of Palestine from a.d. 
1917 to a . d . 1948. 

Throughout those crucial thirty years the British attitude—common 
to all parties and adopted by successive ministries—was one of culpably 
wilful blindness, 1 The Palestine which the British had conquered from 
the ‘Osmanlis in a.d. 1917-18 was a province of an Ottoman World in 
which mixed populations had been exploding, with a fearful cost in 
human suffering, ever since the extermination of the Muslim diaspora 
intheMoreaby Greek Orthodox Christian insurgents in a.d. 1821. 2 Even 
British statesmen who were ignorant of nineteenth-century Ottoman 
history could not be unaware of the fate that had overtaken the Armen¬ 
ian diasporit in Anatolia in a.d. 1915; and, after that portent in this 
adjacent Ottoman territory had failed to deter the British from embarking 
in Palestine on the deliberate creation of a new explosive mixture of 
mutually incompatible national ingredients, the fate that overtook the 
Greek diaspora in Anatolia in a.d. 1922 might still have counselled them 
to reconsider the Balfour Declaration before it was too late. A third 
warning was given them by the explosion that inevitably followed in 
Palestine itself in a.d. 1929. Yet, in spite of these awful object lessons, 
British statesmanship doggedly kept Palestine headed for manifest 
disaster while the local situation went from bad to worse until it got 
completely out of hand as a result of the advent of the Nazis to power in 
Germany, their unprecedentedly inhuman persecution of the Jews in the 
Reich, and the extension of this campaign of ‘genocide’ to the rest of Con¬ 
tinental Europe after the outbreak of a Second World War in a.d. 1939. 

From first to last, there was never a practicable plan in British minds 
for peacefully stabilizing the explosively unstable situation in Palestine 
which Britain had deliberately created. The British Government did not 
attempt to stabilize even the respective numbers of the Arab and Jewish 
elements in the population until the Jewish minority had been allowed 
to become so large—‘approaching a third of the entire population of the 
country’ 3 —that there was no longer any chance of its being willing to 
remain a minority in a bi-national state and no longer any possibility of 
such a state, if ever constituted on paper, finding it possible to govern it¬ 
self through the Western institution of majority rule. 4 

1 See p. 290, n. 2, above. * See pp. 100-2. above. 

3 United Kingdom Parliamentary Paper Cmd. 6019 of the 17th May. 1039. para. 6. 

♦ See p. 305, n. 4, below. 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 


3 °S 


Though the Mandatory Power’s official apologists might offer juridical 
proofs that British promises to Jews and Arabs in respect of Palestine 
were not formally incompatible, it would have been difficult to argue 
that the undeniably incompatible expectations which had been en¬ 
gendered by these British promises in Jewish and in Arab minds were not 
legitimate inferences, on their part, from the British declarations. 1 
Whatever an official British spokesman might say, or the Jewish Agency 
profess, during the earlier phases of the mandatory regime, it was 
psychologically impossible to promise the establishment in Palestine of 
‘a national home’ for the Jewish people—specifically including the facili¬ 
tation of Jewish immigration and the encouragement of close settlement 
by Jews on the land—without encouraging Zionists to look forward to 
the establishment there of a Jewish national state, notwithstanding the 
stipulation in the Balfour Declaration and in the Mandate that the rights 
and position of other sections of the population should not be prejudiced, 
and likewise impossible to promise ‘the development of self-governing 
institutions’ 2 to a country in which the Arab clement in the population 
was in an overwhelming majority, at the time when the mandate was 
conferred and the terms of the mandate were worked out, 3 without 
encouraging Palestinian Arabs to look forward to the establishment in 
Palestine of an Arab national state, notwithstanding the stipulation in 
the Mandate, as well as in the Balfour Declaration, requiring the 
establishment in Palestine of a Jewish ‘national home’. 

The object lesson of Turco-Greek and Turco-Armenian relations 
during a century culminating in the two catastrophes of a . d . 1915 and 
a . d . 1922 confuted in advance the Mandator)' Power’s official pious 
belief that the mandatory regime would somehow miraculously save 
Great Britain’s honour by engendering one day a self-governing bi¬ 
national Arab-Jewish Palestinian state. 4 In a memorandum of the 3rd 


1 In the United Kingdom Parliamentary Paper Cmd. 6019 of the 17th May, 1939, 
para. 3, the Mandatory* Power confessed that 'the Royal Commission [of a . d . 1936-7] 
and previous commissions of enquiry’ had ‘drawn attention to the ambiguity of certain 
expressions in the Mandate, such as the expression "a national home for the Jewish 
people", and’ that they had ‘found in this ambiguity and in the resulting uncertainty 
as to the objectives of policy a fundamental cause of unrest and hostility between Arabs 
and Jews.’ 1 Mandate for Palestine, Article 2. 

l The mandate for Palestine was conferred on Great Britain on the 25th April, 1920, 
by the Supreme Council of the Allied Powers during the Conference of San Remo; the 
final text of the instrument in which the mandate was embodied was dated the 24th 
July, 1922; the mandate officially came into force on the 29th September, 1923. Accord¬ 
ing to a census taken by the Mandatory Power on the 23rd October, 1922, there were 
in Palestine on that date 671,098 Arabs (including Matawilah, Druses, and Christians, 
as well as Sunnis), 83,704 Jew*, and 2,290 others (Samaritans, Bahil‘is, Hindus, Sikhs) 
in a total population of 757.*82 (Palestine Government: Report and General Abstractt 

« ' the Census of 1922, p. 58). On this showing, the Arab majority in the population of 
destine amounted to nearly 90 per cent, of the whole at the date when the second article 
of the Mandate for Palestine was drafted. 

« At as late a date as the 17th May, r 939 , when the hands of the clock of History were 
indicating the approach of the eleventh hour, the United Kingdom Government were 
still declaring that, apart from their specific obligation under the Mandate ‘to secure 
the development of self-governing institutions in Palestine’, ‘they would regard it as 
contrary to the whole spirit of the mandate system that the population of Palestine 
should remain for ever under mandatory tutelage’. Yet, in the same paragraph of the 
aame state paper (Cmd. 6019 of 1939, para. 8), they found themselves constrained to 
confess that, while they desired 'to see established ultimately an independent Palestine 
state ... in which the two peoples in Palestine, Arabs and Jews’, could 'share authority 
in government in such a way that the essential interests of each’ would be ‘secured’, they 





3 o 6 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

June, 1922, Sir Winston Churchill, as British Secretary of State for the 
Colonies, had the hardihood to commit himself to the opinion that the 
Balfour Declaration did ‘not contain or imply anything which need 
cause either alarm to the Arab population of Palestine or disappointment 
to the Jews'. The harsh truth was that, in issuing the Balfour Declaration 
and subsequently undertaking a mandate for Palestine in which its terms 
were embodied, Great Britain was condemning one or other of the two 
communities concerned to suffer a fearful catastrophe in the same breath 
in which she was undertaking to make herself responsible ‘for safe¬ 
guarding the civil and religious rights of all the inhabitants of Palestine, 
irrespective of race and religion’. 

In the light of sensational events in adjacent Ottoman territories it 
could be predicted with assurance after a.d. 1915, and with double 
assurance after a . d . 1922, that the mandatory regime in Palestine would 
end in the death or eviction or subjugation of hundreds of thousands of 
human beings. The only open question was whether these non-divinely 
predestined victims were to be Arab or Jewish men, women, and 
children; and the denouement in a.d. 1948-9 bore out the contentions 
made in the Arab reply to the Churchill memorandum of a.d. 1922. It 
was incontestable that, during the thirty years ending in the terminal 
date of the British mandatory regime in a.d. 1948, the three hundred 
thousand Jewish immigrants introduced into Palestine in the course of 
that period entered the country ‘by the might of England against the 
will of the people, who’ were ‘convinced that these’ had ‘come to strangle 
them’; 1 and the event proved that this British action did in truth mean 
the Palestinian Arabs’ ‘extinction sooner or later’, in spite of the clear 
undertaking in the Balfour Declaration and the Mandate that nothing 
should be done that might prejudice the civil and religious rights of 
existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine. 

Germany’s and the United States' Responsibility for the Catastrophe in 
Palestine 

The perversely predestined catastrophe in Palestine in a . d . 1948 was 
precipitated by three events. The first of these was the rise of the Jewish 

were ‘unable at present to foresee the exact constitutional forms which government in 
Palestine’ would ‘eventually take’ and (para. io(v)) were making ‘no proposals at this 
stage regarding the establishment of an elective legislature’. 

1 According to the United Kingdom Parliamentary Paper Cmd. 6019 of the 17th 
May, 1939 . P«ra. 6, more than 100,000 Jews had immigrated into Palestine by that date 
since the publication of the Churchill memorandum of the 3rd June, 1922, and the 
population of the Jewish national home had risen to some 450,000 (nearly a third of the 
total population of the country). According to the Government of Palestine, Statistical 
Abstract, 1943 (Jerusalem 1944, Government Printing Press), p. 3, the period 1022 to 
1942 saw a total increase of 400.618 in the Jewish population of Palestine, from 83,790 
to 484.408 (29.9 per cent, of the total population of the country), and, of these 400,618 
additional Jewish souls, no less than 305,803 were immigrants and no more than 
94.815 were the fruit of natural increase. The total increase in the number of the 
Palestinian Muslims during the same period was 406,115; of these, no less than 386,100 
were the fruit of natural increase (thanks to the cessation of Ottoman military conscrip¬ 
tion and the improvement in public health under a British mandatory rdgime): and, 
of the 20,015 souls, out of these 406,115, that were added to the Muslim population of 
Palestine during these years from sources other than natural increase, no more than 
10.315 were immigrants; for 9,700 of them were inhabitants of districts transferred to 
Palestine from the Lebanon and Syria in a.d. 1923. 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 307 
community in the United States, subsequently to the Jewish influx from 
the Russian Pale in and after a. d. I88I, 1 to a degree of economic and politi¬ 
cal power in American life at which the Jewish vote had become a force in 
the arena of American domestic politics for whose support the two party 
machines must eagerly compete, and which therefore neither of them 
could afford to alienate. The second decisive event was the 'genocide’ of 
the Jewish diaspord in Continental Europe at German Gentile hands in 
a.d. 1933-45; the third was the outbreak of ‘a cold war’ between the 
Soviet Union and the United States after the overthrow of Fascism by 
the united efforts of Western Parliamentary Democracy and Communism 
in the Second World War. None of these events had any intrinsic con¬ 
nexion with the issue between Jews and Arabs in Palestine, 2 yet, between 
them, they had an effect that was as decisive as it was untoward and 
inequitable on the course of this act in the tragedy. 

There was neither justice nor expediency in the exaction from 
Palestinian Arabs of compensation due to European Jews for crimes 
committed against them by Western Gentiles. Justice required that 
the debt to Continental European Jewry which the Western World had 
incurred through the criminality of a Western nation should be assumed 
by a defeated Germany’s victorious Western adversaries; and expediency 
pointed in the same direction as justice; for the victorious Western 
countries between them did possess the capacity—for which Palestine’s 
resources were quite inadequate—of absorbing the European Jewish 
survivors of the Furor Teutonicus without seriously deranging their own 
domestic social equilibrium. On the 15th December, 1946, the General 
Assembly of the United Nations Organization duly urged each of its 
members to receive its fair share of non-repatriable persons for permanent 
resettlement in its territory at the earliest possible time, 3 but this resolu¬ 
tion was not welcomed cither by the Jewish diaspork in the United 
States or by the Zionists. The American Jews may have been moved 
partly by the self-regarding consideration that even a moderate further 
increase in their own numbers might prejudice their already delicate 
relations with their Gentile fellow citizens, and the makers of Zionist 
polity partly by a callous determination to turn the personal tribulations 
of European Jewry to account for the promotion of Zionist political aims 
in Palestine. Whatever the mixture of Jewish motives may have been, 
Jewry made it clear that it had set its heart on a Jewish national state 
in Palestine as an asylum for the remnant of the European diaspord; 
and thereupon the Democratic and Republican parties in the United 
States, and the United States and the Soviet Union in the United 
Nations Organization, vied with one another in contending for Jewish 
support by displaying a competitive zeal for furthering the fulfilment of 

« Sec pp. 292 and 294, above. 

* The rise and character of the National Socialist Movement in Germany and the 
inauguration and terms of the Mandate in Palestine were, of course, indirectly connected 
with one another in the sense that both the Mandate and National Socialism were out¬ 
comes of the defeat of the Quadruple Alliance in the First World War; but this rather 
tenuous ultimate common origin was the only relation between them. 

> United Nations: Resolutions adopted by the General Assembly. 23 rd October- 15 th 
December, 1946 (Lake Success 1947. U.N.O.), Resolution No. 62(1), para, (e), on 
p. 98. 



3 o8 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
Jewish aspirations, as Great Britain and Germany had contended for 
Jewish support in the likewise critical years a.d. 1915-17. 

Realpolitik —in the twofold form of a competition for the winning of 
Jewish support both in the international struggle between the United 
States and the Soviet Union and in the domestic struggle between the 
Democratic and Republican parties in the United States—was not, of 
course, the only motive that moved America to relieve Great Britain 
unceremoniously of as much of the blood-guiltiness for the tragedy in 
Palestine as she could manage at this late hour to transfer from the ex- 
Mandatory Power’s head on to her own. 1 The American approach to the 
Palestinian problem was, on the whole, less Machiavellian than it was 
Quixotic. 2 While the Arab victims of the Palestinian tragedy were in¬ 
visible to most American eyes, the Jewish victims of the European 
tragedy were brought alive to Gentile American imaginations by the 
prominence in the United States of a Jewish diaspora which, had no 
Arab counterpart there; and this vivid realization of the European Jews’ 
sufferings smote Gentile American consciences—mainly, no doubt, 
because those sufferings had been inflicted by the American Gentiles’ 
German soi-disant fellow Christians, and partly perhaps also because the 
American Gentiles were uneasily aware of a repressed yet unconscionable 
vein of Antisemitism in their own hearts. 

President Truman’s personal susceptibility to this popular American 
confusion of mind and mixture of motives might go far to explain presi¬ 
dential interventions in the Palestinian imbroglio which would have been 
utterly cynical if they had not been partially innocent-minded. The 
Missourian politician-philanthropist’s eagerness to combine expediency 
with charity by assisting the wronged and suffering Jews would appear 
to have been untempered by any sensitive awareness that he was there¬ 
by abetting the infliction of wrongs and sufferings on the Arabs; and his 
excursions into the stricken field in Palestine reminded a reader of the 
Fioretti di San Francesco of the tragi-comic exploit there attributed to 
the impetuously tender-hearted Brother Juniper, who, according to the 
revealing talc, was so effectively moved by a report of the alimentary 
needs of an invalid that he rushed, knife in hand, into a wood full of 
unoffending pigs, and straightway cut off a live pig’s trotter to provide 
his ailing fellow human being with the dish that his soul desired, with¬ 
out noticing that he was leaving the mutilated animal writhing in agony 
and without pausing to reflect that his innocent victim was not either 
the invalid’s property or his own. 3 It must be added that the American 
repetition of this story included a sequel that was not to be found in the 
Italian original. In the Fioretti there is no indication that the sufferings 
of the victim of a holy man’s impulsive charity excited any human pity— 

J For a British observer, this spectacle had the prim humour of the denouement of 
R. L. Stevenson’s fantasia The Bottle Imp, in which the vial of wrath is eventually 
carried off unconcernedly by the mate of an American ship. 

1 This characteristically ‘Anglo-Saxon’ attitude of combining an unavowed yet patent 
Machiavellianism with a suspect yet sincere Quixotry was displayed as grotesquely by 
the British in and after the First World War as by the Americans after the Second World 
War in the Palestinian policy of these two great English-speaking peoples. 

J Fioretti di San Francesco d’Assisi: ‘Vita di Fratc Gincpro’, cap. i: 'Come Frate 
Grnepro taglid il Piede ad uno Porco solo per darlo a uno Infermo’. 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 309 
for, when the owner of the unfortunate animal did eventually slaughter 
it, he was concerned, not to put a suffering creature out of its misery, but 
to atone, by making a feast for Brother Juniper and his brethren, for his 
own ungodly indignation at the damage done to his property—whereas, 
in the annals of the United Nations Organization, it is recorded that the 
United States Government took the initiative in relieving the plight of 
some 684,000 Palestinian Arab ‘displaced persons’ by providing half 
the total sum that was estimated to be necessary for purposes of first aid 
to these human victims of ‘Anglo-Saxon attitudes’. 

The Retrospect and the Outlook 

The consequent situation in Palestine was fraught with geographical, 
historical, and psychological paradoxes. The one substantial piece of 
Palestinian territory west of Jordan which the Zionist State of Israel had 
not engulfed by the time in a.d. 1949 when Jewish-Arab hostilities in 
Palestine were suspended was the Hill Country of Ephraim, which had 
been the historic Israel’s first Palestinian foothold and their Samaritan 
legatees’ last Palestinian stronghold. The core of the Zionist State’s 
territory was the ci-devant land of the Philistines in the Shephelah, which 
had never before been colonized by an Israelite or Jewish population and 
which, during the thirteen centuries for which Philistines and Israelites 
had lived in Palestine side by side, 1 had not even been united politically 
with Ephraim or Judah save for a few brief periods, at long intervals, of 
Philistine rule over Israel or Jewish rule over Philistia. On its two flanks 
the Zionist Philistia Rediviva was reaching inland with its left arm into 
‘Galilee of the Gentiles’, which had been forcibly converted to Judaism 
less than a century before the beginning of the Christian Era, and with 
its right arm into the Negeb in the track of the Philistines’ Chercthite 
fellow invaders who had anticipated the Zionists in heading for ‘Aqabah. 2 
In a.d. 1949, as in a.d. 135 and a.d. 70 and 586 b.c. and 721 B.c. and 
732 B.C., a Palestinian community, uprooted from its native soil by a 
military and political tornado, was facing the challenge of being scattered 
abroad among the nations in order to show whether it would have the 
spirit to preserve its identity in diaspora like Judah or would vanish like 
Israel; but these twentieth-century Palestinian d&racines were Gentiles, 
not Jews, while the invaders who had uprooted them were Jews, not 
Gentiles. These geographical and historical paradoxes were the effects 
of a psychological paradox that far surpassed them. 

The paradox of Zionism was that, in its demonic effort to build a com¬ 
munity that was to be utterly Jewish, it was working as effectively for the 
assimilation of Jewry to a Western Gentile World as the individual Jew 
who opted for becoming a Western bourgeois ‘of Jewish religion’ or a 
Western bourgeois agnostic. The historic Jewry was the diaspora, and 
the distinctively Jewish ethos and institutions—a meticulous devotion 
to the Mosaic Law and a consummate virtuosity in commerce and 
finance—were those which the diaspora, in the course of ages, had 

1 i.e. from an early date in the twelfth century b.c. to a.d. 135. 

1 See VI. vii. 102, n. 1. and p. 338, n. 1, below. 



310 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

wrought into social talismans endowing this geographically scattered 
community with a magic capacity for survival. For good or for evil, by 
the common consent of all first-hand witnesses, including Gentiles who 
were fascinated by it and Jews who were repelled by it, this masterly 
adaptation to a diasporan environment was the essence of ‘Jewishness’ 
in the universally accepted historical meaning of the term. Latter-day 
Jewish Westernizers of the Liberal and the Zionist school alike were 
breaking with this historic Jewish past; and Zionism’s significant differ¬ 
ence from Liberalism lay in making the breach more drastic. 

In deserting the diaspork individually in order to lose himself in the 
ranks of a Modern Western Gentile urban bourgeoisie, the Liberal 
Jew was assimilating himself to a Gentile social milieu that had pre¬ 
viously gone far, on its side, to assimilate itself socially and psychologi¬ 
cally to the Jewish diaspord; in deserting the diaspord collectively in 
order to build up a new nation, closely settled on the land, on the trail of 
the Modern Western Protestant Christian pioneers who had created the 
United States, Canada, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand, the 
Zionists were assimilating themselves to a Gentile social milieu which 
had no counterpart in the life of a post-Exilic Jewry, and whose own 
inspiration from the Old Testament was derived, not from Isaiah any 
more than it was from Deutcro-Isaiah, but from the Books of Joshua 
and Exodus.' 

The Zionists’ audacious aim was to invert, in a new life of their own 
making, all the distinctively Jewish characteristics enshrined in the 
diaspora’s traditional life. They set out defiantly and enthusiastically to 
turn themselves into manual labourers instead of brain workers, country¬ 
folk instead of city-dwellers, producers instead of middlemen, agricul¬ 
turists instead of financiers, warriors instead of shopkeepers, terrorists 
instead of martyrs, aggressively spirited Semites instead of peaceably 
abject non-Aryans; and this Nietzschean revaluation of all traditional 
Jewish values, for destruction as well as for construction, for evil as well 
as for good, was directed towards the horizon-filling narrow-hearted aim 
of making themselves sons of a latter-day Eretz Israel in Palestine that 
was to be 'as Jewish as’ England ‘was English’, 2 instead of remaining the 

1 The sanction derived by Bible-Christian supplantcrs of American Indians, African 
Bantu, and Australian Blackfellows from the Israelites’ biblically recorded conviction 
that God had instigated them to exterminate the Canaanites has been noticed in II. i. 
at x-27. We may now go on to observe that the divers Neo-Canaanites victimized by the 
divers Neo-Israelites were not all equally tractable. Fortune perhaps rather than fore¬ 
sight had provided the British Israelite invaders of North America and Australia with 
local Canaanites who were sufficiently feeble and few to allow of their being rapidly 
reduced to a residue which could be parked in reservations. The South African Dutch 
Israelites’ Bantu Canaanites, the British Israelites’ 'Wild Irish’ Canaanites, and the 
Prussian Israelites’ Polish Canaanites could not be disposed of either so expeditiously or 
so conveniently as the North American Indians and the Australian Blackfellows. The 
Bantu’s primitive feebleness in culture was made up for by their strength in numbers, 
and the numerical weakness of the Poles and the Irish by their inheritance of a high cul¬ 
ture. The Zionist Israelites’ Arab Canaanites combined the cultural strength of the Irish 
and the Poles with the numerical strength of the Bantu. The Palestinian Arabs were 
heirs of the Arabic Civilization and members of an Arabic-speaking society whose 
geographical domain stretched away beyond the bounds of Palestine as far as Mosul, 
Morocco. Zanzibar, and Java. The Arabs would, in fact, be almost as difficult to wipe 
off the map as the Chinese or the Hindus- 

* A phrase guoted by Sir Winston Churchill in his memorandum of the 3rd June, 
1922(seep. 296, n. 3, above). 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE JEWS 311 
step-sons of a New York, London, Manchester, and Frankfort that were 
not more Jewish than Bombay was Parsee or Ispahan Armenian. 

Within the thirty years a.d. 1918-48 the Zionist pioneers in Palestine 
duly achieved this almost incredible tour de force of minting a fresh type 
of Jew in whom the child of the diaspora was no longer recognizable. 
The image and superscription on this new human coinage was not 
Hilld's but Caesar’s. The Janus-figurc—part American farmer-tech¬ 
nician, part Nazi sicaritis —was of a characteristically Western stamp. 
Yet, w-hile a collective Westernization in a Modern Western nationalist 
mould was the Zionists’ triumphantly achieved objective, the lode-stone 
that had drawn them so forcefully to the Westernizing goal that they had 
reached through a feat of left-handed self-transfiguration was ‘the real 
presence’ of the Holy Land. To judge by the unquestionable potency of 
this psychological factor in enabling the Zionist pioneers to accomplish 
what they did accomplish in Palestine in this generation, we may surmise 
that the annals of Zionism would have been less dynamic, and the entries 
against its name in the Book of Judgement less deeply scored on both 
sides of the account, if the scene of Zionist exploits had been an East 
African Arcadia and not a Palestinian Phlegra. Yet this mystical feeling 
for an historical Eretz Israel, which inspired the Zionist pioneers with the 
spiritual power to move mountains, was entirely derived from a dias- 
poran orthodox theology that convicted the Zionists of an importunity 
which verged upon impiety in their attempt to take out of God’s hands 
the fulfilment of God’s promise to restore Israel to Palestine on God’s 
own initiative. 

What judgement on the secular Zionist substitute for the diaspora’s 
religious hope would be delivered by the mind of an orthodox Jewish 
devotee w-hile he was wailing at the retaining-wall of an annihilated 
Temple as a testimony of Israel’s contrition and as an appeal to God to 
hasten the promised time when He would show a penitent Israel his 
mercy by restoring Israel to Palestine in God’s own way? And what 
action w-ould a Zionist Israeli Ministry of the Interior instruct its police 
to take against a Jew who persisted in wailing after Israel had been 
restored by force of Zionist human arms ? Would this traditional Jewish 
religious rite be proscribed by Zionist political authorities as a provoca¬ 
tive act of high treason—constructively a pro-Arab demonstration— 
against the accomplished fact of a profanely man-made Palestinian 
Zionist State? 1 

The practical achievement of the Zionist Movement’s political aims 
had in fact brought a new Jewish problem on to the stage of history. The 
familiar issue between Jew and Gentile would be duplicated henceforth 
by an at first sight novel issue between an old-fashioned Syriac-minded 
Jewish diaspora in the United States and a new-fangled Western- 
minded Jewish nation in Palestine. The metamorphosis which Zionism 
had induced in its adherents clinched the demonstration—already im¬ 
plicit in the un-Jcwishncss of the ethos of the surviving ‘Jews in 
Fastnesses’ 2 —that Jewishness, in the accepted historical meaning of the 

« A prudent Jewish wailer would stay on the Jordonian side of the line by which 
Jerusalem was now partitioned. * See II. ii. 402-12. 



312 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
term, was not the indelible brand of a particular physico-psychic race 
but was the plastic impress of a particular psychological response to a 
particular social challenge. Within the span of a single generation the 
different response to a different challenge that had been made by the 
Zionist pioneers in Palestine had produced a striking differentiation of 
Sthos and type; 1 and this was not, after all, a unique occurrence. In a 
neighbouring province of the Ottoman World in the course of the 
century that had elapsed between the establishment of a Greek national 
state in a.d. 1821-29 and the extermination of the Ottoman Greek 
diaspork in a.d. 1922, the ‘Yunani’ citizens of a new Westernizing 
Kingdom of Greece had likewise become noticeably differentiated from 
their former fellow members of a Millet-i-Rum who had continued to be 
ra'iyeh of the Porte. In the measure in which the citizens of a Zionist 
Israeli state succeeded in assimilating themselves collectively to con¬ 
temporary' American and German Gentiles, they would become pro¬ 
gressively alienated from the members of a Western Jewish diaspora 
from which the Zionist Israel had sprung. The issue arising from this 
estrangement between a traditional Jewry and its changeling offspring 
might prove to be a difficult one, since, even after its extermination in 
Continental Europe, the diaspora remained several times more numer¬ 
ous, and many times more wealthy, than a Palestinian Israeli nation 
could ever hope to become. Indeed, for as far as could be seen ahead, the 
financial and political sympathy and support of the Jewish diaspora in 
the United States would continue to be a Palestinian Israel’s life-line; and 
it remained to be seen for how long a time these generous foreign sub¬ 
scribers to Israel, who, besides being Jews, were also American citizens, 
would remain content to submit to ‘taxation without representation’. 

In its diminutiveness, its fanaticism, and its Ishmaclitish enmity with 
its neighbours the new Zionist Israel in Palestine was a reproduction of 
the Modern Western national state that, in its faithfulness, verged on 
being a parody; and it was a misfortune, for both Jewry and the World, 
that this statelet—begotten of so much idealism, self-sacrifice, crime, 
injustice, and suffering—should have seen the light at a moment when it 
might be hoped that the species of community of which this was the 
youngest member was at last approaching its eclipse. This hope could 
be cherished mid-way through the twentieth century of the Christian 
Era because a Modern Western Nationalism was an archaistic throw¬ 
back to a rustic parochial past state of the Western Society which was 
being stamped as an untenable anachronism, at the very time when it 
was being revived, by the simultaneous flowering of a Modern Western 
technology which was expanding the range of Western life in all its 
aspects from a parochial to an oecumenical scale. 1 

On the morrow of a Second World War the existing national states, 
from the smallest to the largest, were striving—with a futile obstinacy 
which they might have spared themselves if they had taken to heart the 
object lesson once contrived by King Canute—to keep at bay the ocean 

1 See Simon, E.: 'What Price Israel’s “Normalcy"?’ in Commentary, April 1949 
(New York 1949, American Jewish Committee). 

1 See IV. iv. 169 and 179-S0. 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE FAR EAST 3 *3 

of oecumenicalism that the roaring gale of technological progress was 
driving against their frail and tortuous dykes. They were piling exchange- 
controls on customs-barriers, immigration-restrictions on exchange- 
controls, and police-cordons on immigration-restrictions, without a 
prospect of being able to do more than vexatiously delay the irresistible 
progress of a tide that was carrying human affairs towards world unity. 
The antiquated patch-work of ghetto-like nation-states, which the air¬ 
man still saw flickering below him on the face of a rapidly coalescing 
World, was assuredly destined to be submerged under a flood whose 
surface would show the shot-silk sheen of communities—scattered 
Jewish-fashion—that had come to be geographically intermingled with¬ 
out losing their distinctive identities. In a World that had been unified by 
Western technology in spite of itself, the institutional future seemed 
likely to lie far less with the Western institution of the national state than 
with the Syriac institution of the millet; and, while the architects of a 
constitution for the World might find useful ideas for the construction 
of their basement in the work of the fathers of the Constitution of the 
United States, the classic organization of the millet system in the 
Ottoman Empire by the genius of Mchmcd the Conqueror might prove 
to be a more fruitful source of inspiration for the design of the living- 
rooms in this promised house of many mansions. 1 

6. The Modern West and the Far Eastern and Indigenous American 

Civilizations 

The Perils of Ignorance 

The living civilizations whose encounters with the Modern West we 
have been surveying up to this point have all been societies that were 
within close range of the Western Society’s radiation; and all of them 
had already had experience of the Western Society before they began to 
be affected by the impact of the Western culture in its modern phase. 
The Jewish diaspora had been geographically intermingled with the 
Western body social since Western Christendom’s first emergence out 
of a post-Hellenic social interregnum, and even the Hindu World had 
been brought into touch with the West through Muslim intermediaries 
before the Modern Western pioneers of oceanic navigation established a 
direct contact with the Hindus by outflanking the Islamic World on the 
south through their circumnavigation of Africa. By contrast, the exis¬ 
tence of the West was still quite unknown to the Transatlantic civili¬ 
zations in the New World, and all but unknown to the Far Eastern 
civilizations in China and Japan, down to the moment when the Modern 
Western pioneer navigators impinged on these more remote societies 
likewise in the course of an oceanic exploration of the surface of the 
planet which took barely half a century (circa a . d . 1492-1542)* to range 
almost as widely as the ubiquitous Ocean itself. 

1 A comment by Dr. James Parkes on this judgement of the present writer’s will be 
found on pp. 706-7. below. 

1 Japan, which was the last new world to be discovered by the Western oceanic 
pioneers during their half-century' of world-wide exploration, was reached by the 
Portuguese in a.d. 1542-3. The Teppo-ki, a chronicle written in Satsuma between the 
years a.d. 1596 and a.d. 1614, gives the 23rd September, 1543, as the date of the first 



3H ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

This ignorance explains the reason for the apparently paradoxical 
fact that the remoter civilizations showed, at the first encounter, a greater 
readiness to open their arms to the Modern West than was shown at the 
time by the Modern West’s better informed next-door neighbours. For 
the Far East and for the New World the Modern West had the attractive¬ 
ness of novelty; and the curiosity which the advent of the Western 
‘Martians’ aroused there was not tempered by any pre-existing hostility 
or even suspicion. On the other hand in Jewish, Eastern Orthodox 
Christian, and Muslim hearts and minds the dominant reaction to the 
impact of the Modern West was not an innocently unsuspecting curiosity 
but a sceptically watchful aversion implanted by lively and painful 
memories of a previous encounter with the same Western Christendom 
in the medieval phase of its history. 1 These neighbours of the West 
remembered her, since the time of the Crusades, as a militantly aggres¬ 
sive society whose aggressiveness had been aggravated by a fanatical 
zeal to impose on all Mankind her local Western version of Christianity. 
Accordingly, all these neighbours of the West continued to keep her at 
arm’s length so long as the fire of fanaticism was still showing its baleful 
red light over the Western horizon. 

The first effect of the internal explosion which fractured the medieval 
unity of the Western Christian Church in the second generation of the 
modem phase of Western history was to raise still higher the already 
high temperature of the Western religious furnace; and, while Catholic 
and Protestant Modern Western Christians were directing part of their 
fire against one another in the Early Modern Western Wars of Religion, 
this fratricidal strife still left an ample margin of Western bigotry to 
spare for indulging a still unabated intolerance towards non-Western 
religious faiths. The neighbouring societies accordingly bided their time 
till the inconclusive destructiveness of the Western Wars of Religion 
had reduced the temperature of Western fanaticism by evoking a revul¬ 
sion against Religion itself in Western hearts and minds; and, as we have 
seen, the reception of the Modem Western culture by Jews, Orthodox 
Christians, and Muslims did not begin until this alien Western way of life 
was able to offer itself to them in a secularized form—with Technology 
enthroned in Religion’s former place at the apex of the Western pyramid 
of values—as the result of a momentous spiritual revolution within the 
bosom of the Western Society itself during the later decades of the 
seventeenth century of the Christian Era. Less prudence in dealing with 
the importunate Western stranger at the gate was shown by the Far 
Eastern and indigenous American civilizations. So far from waiting for 
the abatement of a Western religious fanaticism of which they had not 
been forewarned by any past experience of it, they laid themselves open 
to the impact of the West in its Early Modern phase, when its traditional 
religious aggressiveness was still in the ascendant. 

In the first half of the sixteenth century of the Christian Era, when the 
ocean-faring Westerners first appeared above their horizon, these four 

PortuRuete landfall in Japan (Boxer, C. R.: The Christian Century in Japan, 1549- 
J650 (Berkeley and Los Angeles 1951, University of California Press), pp. 23 and 26). 

* Sec pp. 277-S0, above, and 346-403, below. 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE FAR EAST 315 
relatively remote societies were all in a more or less unhealthy social 
condition. All, so far as the latter-day historian can judge, were by 
then already in decline, and some of them had already travelled far 
along the road towards disintegration. The Japanese and Central 
American societies were both at the climax of the second paroxysm of 
a Time of Troubles which portended the imminence of a universal 
state; the Andean and Chinese civilizations were both already in the 
universal state phase. The Incaic Empire, when Pizarro smote it, was in 
what might be described in Hellenic terminology as a ‘post-Trajanic’ 
condition of lassitude due to a bout of over-exertion. In annexing the 
domain of the Karas in Ecuador to the Empire of the Incas in Peru, the 
Emperor Tupac Yupanqui (imperabat circa a.d. 1448-82) had taxed 
the Andean Society's resources and had bequeathed to his successor 
Huayna Capac an intractable legacy of political unrest which eventually 
played into the hands of the Spanish aggressors from the other side of the 
planet. 1 As for the Chinese Society of that date, it was still farther gone 
than the Andean in the stage of its social decay. An alien universal state 
imposed by the Mongols had been overthrown by a ‘Zealot’-minded 
indigenous reaction, and the resulting Ming regime in its turn had 
already passed its zenith by the time when the Modern Western 
occan-farcrs made their first landfall on China’s southern coast. 

Thus the Far Eastern and the American pair of civilizations were both 
in poor condition for coping with the West in its still bigoted Early 
Modern phase; yet, in the event, the two stories took sharply different 
turns. The American civilizations were as unsuccessful as the Far 
Eastern civilizations were successful in mastering a formidably difficult 
situation. 

The Fate and Future of the Indigenous American Civilizations 

The Spanish conquerors of the Central American and Andean worlds 
immediately overwhelmed their ill-equipped and unsuspecting victims 
by force of arms, as the contemporary Dutch and English pioneers of 
Arctic exploration were able to club to death whole droves of puffins and 
penguins which were incapable of resisting their human assailants and 
yet made no move to escape them because this was their first encounter 
with Mankind and they had therefore still to learn by cruel experience 
that Man was the most murderous wild beast on the face of the planet. 
At this first impact the indigenous American societies were submerged. 
The alien invaders virtually exterminated those elements in the popula¬ 
tion that were the depositories of the indigenous cultures; they sub¬ 
stituted for them an alien dominant minority by sowing the conquered 
territories thick with urban colonies of Spanish settlers; 1 and they re¬ 
duced the rural population to the status of an internal proletariat of 
the victorious Western Christian Society by putting their labour at the 
disposal of Spanish economico-religious entrepreneurs on the under¬ 
standing that these planter-missionaries would make it part of their 
business to convert their human flocks to the Roman Catholic form of 


Sec V. vi. 193. 


* See VI. vU. 135- 



3 i6 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
Christianity. 1 The Spaniards’ suppression of the indigenous civilizations 
of the Americas was in fact a barbaric counterpart of the Macedonians’ 
suppression of the indigenous civilizations of Egypt and South-Western 
Asia after the domain of the Achacmcnian Empire had been conquered 
for Hellenism by Alexander the Great. 

In either case it looked, during the first chapter of the story, as if the 
culture of the subjugated society had been, not just temporarily overlaid, 
but permanently obliterated. In the Hellenic instance, however, the 
later chapters of the story show the submerged Oriental cultures sur¬ 
prisingly reasserting themselves after the lapse of many centuries and 
eventually expelling the intrusive Hellenic Civilization by force of arms 
in a Blitzkrieg in which the feats of Alexander’s Macedonians were 
emulated, after the passage of a millennium, by the Primitive Muslim 
Arabs. In another cycle of history an Arabic Muslim Society that had 
been overwhelmed by the Ottoman arms of Sultan Selim the Grim, in 
the same generation that had seen the Spanish conquest of the Americas, 
subsequently succeeded in shaking off the ascendancy of an Iranic 
Muslim culture, which the Ottoman conquest had carried with it, after 
a bondage that had lasted for the shorter yet still impressive term of 
four hundred years. 2 These other instances, in which the whole story 
was known to a twentieth-century Western historian, would counsel 
him to beware of jumping to the conclusion that the apparent annihila¬ 
tion of the Central American and Andean civilizations by the Modern 
West at its first impact was the whole story of these two encounters. 

Even if the fully unfolded talcs of the encounter between the Arabic 
and the Iranic Civilization and the encounter between the Hellenic 
Civilization and its Oriental contemporaries had not stood on record 
in the twentieth-century Western historian’s archives, the history of 
Mexico since a.d. 1910 might have suggested to him that the indigenous 
civilizations of the Americas might reassert themselves, not, perhaps, 
as separate cultures, yet at least as distinctive variations on a Modern 
Western cultural theme. 3 In the present writer’s generation this pos¬ 
sibility was already discernible; but it was then still so embryonic that, 
even if it could be surmised that a second chapter in the history of the 
encounters between the Modern West and the indigenous civilizations 
of the Americas would eventually unfold itself, the twentieth-century 
historian must resign himself to leaving the writing of this story to 
Posterity while he turned his own attention away from speculations 
about the ultimate fate of the submerged Central American and Andean 
worlds to the more profitable study of an already current second chapter 
in the history of the encounters between the Modern West and the two 
Far Eastern civilizations. 

Chinese and Japanese Reactions to the Impact of an Early Modern West 

Unlike the Central American and Andean societies, the Chinese and 
Japanese societies succeeded in holding their own against the West in its 
Early Modern Phase. Instead of being overwhelmed, they survived the 

1 The institution of the tveomienda has been touched upon in VI. vii. 145. 

2 See IV. iv. 1x3-14. 3 See IV. iv. 79-81. 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE FAR EAST 317 
deadly peril, to which they were exposed by their initial ignorance, of 
surrendering to the attractiveness of a strange presence of which they 
knew no evil. They managed with impunity to weigh the Western 
Civilization in the balance, find it wanting, make up their minds to cast 
it out, and muster the necessary force for putting into effect a considered 
policy of virtual non-intercourse. The sequel, however, had revealed, by 
the time of writing mid-way through the twentieth century, that this 
mastery which the Far East had displayed at its first encounter with the 
West was not the whole story but was merely the first chapter of it. 

In breaking off relations with the West in the form in which the West 
had presented itself to them in its Early Modern phase, the Chinese 
and Japanese had not disposed of ‘the Western Question’ once for all; 
for the West did not remain rooted to the spot on which it had been 
standing at the moment when the Far East had dismissed it. The West 
proceeded thereafter to put itself through the spiritual revolution that 
opened a new chapter in Modern Western history at the turn of the 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and, in now substituting Techno¬ 
logy for Religion as the highest value, in Western estimation, in the 
Western cultural scale, it reopened 'the Western Question’ for Far 
Eastern hermit kingdoms with an importunity to which they could not 
be for long impervious. In abandoning its traditional insistence that aliens 
must become converts to some Western form of religion as a condition 
sine qua non for being given the freedom of the Western Society, the 
West was jettisoning the bigotry that had previously made it appear 
repulsively menacing in Far Eastern eyes, while, conversely, in placing 
its treasure henceforward in Technology and diverting its psychic 
energy to this field from its repellent traditional aim of converting Man¬ 
kind to Western Christianity by force, the West was launching itself on 
a course of technological progress that was rapidly to eclipse its own or 
any other society’s previous achievements in this line; and a Western 
technological superiority which, at the earlier encounter, had struck Far 
Eastern observers of it as being formidably attractive was now raised 
to successive higher degrees of potency until the Far Eastern peoples, 
like their Hindu, Muslim, and Orthodox Christian contemporaries, 
found themselves confronted with a choice between mastering this 
superlative Western technology or succumbing to it. 

From this point onwards the experience of the Far Eastern societies 
in their dealings with the West was the same as that of the other living 
non-Wcstcm civilizations; the distinctive feature in the Far Eastern 
case was that this encounter with the Modern West in its latter-day 
secularized form was the Far East’s second meeting with the Modern 
West, and not its first; and, for a student of encounters between civiliza¬ 
tions, it is interesting to study the points of likeness and difference 
between these two successive collisions of the same pair of Far Eastern 
civilizations with a Western Society which, in the interval between the 
two acts, had deliberately withdrawn its treasure from Religion and re¬ 
invested it in mundane values. 

In this Far Eastern drama the Chinese and Japanese dramatis personae 
behaved alike in some ways and in other ways diversely. A striking point 



318 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
of likeness was that in the second act the reception of a secularized 
Modern Western culture was initiated in both China and Japan from 
below upwards, in spite of the fact that in the middle of the nineteenth 
century, which was the time when this movement started in both 
societies, either of them was embodied politically in an indigenous uni¬ 
versal state—China in the Manchu Empire and Japan in the Tokugawa 
Shogunate. The failure of both the Ch’ing rdgime in China and the 
Tokugawa regime in Japan to take the lead in initiating the process of 
Westernization at this stage stands out in contrast to the course of 
events in the corresponding chapters of Russian and Ottoman history, 
in which the reception of a secularized version of the culture of the 
Modern West was imposed on the people from above downwards by 
their rulers, instead of being forced upon the rulers by the peoples from 
below upwards. Thus at the opening of this chapter the histories of 
China and Japan followed an identical distinctive course. On the other 
hand the nineteenth-century Japanese Westernizing movement quickly 
parted company with the contemporary movement in China by changing 
over into the Petrine Russian rhythm; and the sixteenth-century 
Westernizing movements in the two Far Eastern societies had taken 
different courses from the outset. In their tentatively accorded and 
subsequently revoked reception of a still unsecularized Modern Western 
culture, the initiative had come from above downwards in a Chinese 
Society that was then already embodied in a universal state and from 
below upwards in a Japanese Society that was then still being racked by 
the last and worst paroxysm of a Time of Troubles. 

The charts of the two Far Eastern societies’ respective reactions to the 
Modern West will also be found to differ in their general conformation 
when we plot them out over a span of four centuries extending from the 
date of initial contact in the first half of the sixteenth century of the 
Christian Era down to the time of writing mid-way through the twentieth 
century. The Chinese curve comes out relatively smooth and the Japanese 
curve relatively jagged. By comparison with the corresponding Chinese 
reactions, the two successive receptions of the Modem Western culture 
in Japan, and the intervening rejection there of the earlier of the two 
versions in which this culture successively presented itself, all went to 
extremes, and the two successive reversals of policy—from reception 
to rejection in the seventeenth century and from rejection to reception 
in the nineteenth century'—were relatively abrupt. The Chinese never 
went so far as the Japanese in surrendering themselves to the Modem 
Western culture on cither occasion 1 or in insulating themselves from 
contact with the West in the intervening stage of anti-Western xeno- 

1 In the earlier of the two encounters the Japanese were far more receptive of an 
Early Modem Western culture than the Chinese were, whereas the Westerners in that 
age were far more receptive of the Chinese culture than they were of the Japanese 
(Boxer, C. R.: The Christian Century in Japan, 1549-1630 (Berkeley and Los Angeles 
I 9 SI. University of California Press), pp. 208-9). In *•!>• *547 ordinary Japanese house¬ 
holders in the principality of Satsunia on the Island of Kyushu were literally opening 
their door* to tne Portuguese by inviting them into their homes as guests (ibid., p. 209). 
On the other hand in a.d. 1613 a Portuguese Jesuit belonging to the China mission, in a 
letter to General Aquaviva, gave it as his opinion that the Japanese members of the 
Society of Jesus, though virtuous, were not so Aportuguesados as the Chinese members 
(ibid., p. 219). 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE FAR EAST 319 
phobia; and the reversals of policy that were decreed in Japan by the 
fiat of a dictator or by the verdict of a revolution were allowed in China 
to work themselves out more gradually and more spontaneously. 

Though in both Far Eastern societies the Early Modern Western 
Christian missionaries made converts who eventually proved their 
sincerity in the hour of trial by sacrificing their lives rather than obey 
an omnipotent government’s command to renounce their exotic adopted 
new faith, the dominant motives in both societies for tentatively embrac¬ 
ing the Early Modern Western Christian culture were not religious but 
secular. In the sixteenth century both the Chinese Imperial Court at 
Peking and the Japanese parochial princelings on the Island of Kyushu 
put up with a religious propaganda which they found boringly unconvinc¬ 
ing and distastefully bigoted 1 for the sake of material benefits which the 
Roman Catholic Christian missionaries had it in their power to bestow 
either directly, through their own personal attainments in the field of 
profane knowledge, or indirectly through their influence over their lay 
fellow Westerners, 

In this chapter of the story the Chinese Imperial Court’s cultivation 
of the Jesuits was less utilitarian or more frivolous—in whichever of the 
two lights we may prefer to regard it—than the contemporary cultivation 
of them in Japan. In Chinese minds the dominant incentive was curiosity; 
and, though, in their curiosity about sixteenth-century Western fire¬ 
arms, the Chinese as well as the Japanese had practical considerations 
in view, the Ming regime’s desire to fortify its tottering authority by 
equipping itself with these new-fangled weapons was far less intense than 
the eagerness of contemporary Japanese war-lords to master a new 
military technique which might play a decisive part in the desperate 
final round of the struggle between them for the prize of becoming the 
founder of a Japanese universal state . 2 

Nor did the Ming or Manchu Imperial Government see in the develop¬ 
ment of trade through Western middlemen 3 those dazzling prospects of 

* The Western Roman Catholic Christian missionaries alienated the Japanese by their 
intolerance (Murdoch, J.: History of Japan, vol. ii (Kobe 1903, Japan Chronicle), p. 
65), and the political awkwardness of this Early Modem Western religious ethos is con¬ 
jectured, by one Late Modern Western historian, to have been Hideyoshi’s main motive 
in proscribing them (ibid., p. 378). In Hideyoshi’s decree of the 25th July, 1587, banish¬ 
ing the Jesuits from Japan, the continued sojourn of non-missionary Western visitors 
was expressly authorized (Boxer, C. R.: The Christian Century in Japan, 1549-1650 
(Berkeley and Los Angeles 1951, University of California Press), pp. 147-8). 

1 The first sen-ice sought by the Japanese from the castaways of a.d. 1542-3 (Sansom, 
G. B.: Japan, A Short Cultural History (London 1932, Cresset Press), p. 406), who were 
their first Portuguese visitors, was to teach the Japanese armourers how to make arque¬ 
buses (Murdoch, J.: History 0/Japan, vol. ii (Kobe 1903, Japan Chronicle), pp. 33-34). 
By the beginning of the last quarter of the sixteenth century. Prince Otamo of the 
principality of Bungo in Kyushu, who became a convert to Christianity in a.d. 1578 
(ibid., pp. 77 and 102), was in possession of fire-arms, including artillery (ibid., p. 98). 
The manufacture, as well as the use, of small arms established itself in Japnn very 
rapidly, but artillery did not come to play as important a part in Japanese as in Western 
warfare, and the art of cannon-founding did not m?ke much headway in Japan (Boxer, 
op. cit., pp. 97 and 206-7). 

1 The business that the Portuguese new-comers found for themselves in the Far 
East was an exchange, not of Western commodities for Far Eastern, but of Chinese for 

J apanese. The Portuguese trade with Japan was based on the Portuguese settlements in 
ukien and Kwanetung, where the Portuguese merchants purchased silk goods for 
export to Japan with Japanese silver (Boxer, op. cit., pp. 92 and 109-10). The English 
and the Spaniards failed to elbow their way into the Japan trade because they failed to 



320 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
commercial profits that excited Japanese cupidity. 1 Towards the close of 
the sixteenth century it looked as if the adoption by the Japanese of the 
contemporary Western art of war and their engagement in commerce 
with Western traders might draw Japan at this stage out of the ambit of 
the Far Eastern Society into the ambit of a Western Society which had 
made itself ubiquitous by conquering the Ocean. Before the advent of the 
Western ocean-farers in the Far East, the Japanese had already taken to 
the sea in a counter-stroke to the abortive attempts of the Mongols to 
invade Japan in a.d. 1274 and in a.d. 1281.* The Japanese had been making 
piratical descents on the coasts of China since a.d. 1369, 3 and, w'hen, after 

win a footing in China (ibid., pp. 300-1). After the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries the Portuguese shippers began to feel the competition of the Japanese and 
Chinese, who by this time had taken to shipping Chinese silk to Japan in Japanese and 
Chinese bottoms. Japanese ocean-faring ships are known to have been licensed for over¬ 
seas trade by Hideyoshi as early as A.D. 1592 (ibid., pp. 261-2), and, during the forty 
years or so during which such licences continued to be issued, 182 voyages were made— 
mostly to Indo-China, though there were also many sailings to Manila (30 between a . d . 
1604 and a . d . 1616) (ibid., pp. 263-4). These Japanese ‘red-seal’ ships were originally 
required by Japanese law to carry Portuguese pilots, but they soon leamt to navigate for 
themselves as far as Malacca (ibid., p. 265). In the art of ship-building, however, the 

B janese remained inferior to the Portuguese, Chinese, and Koreans (ibid., pp. 266-7). 

A.D. 1612 the Japanese imported 5,000 quintals of Chinese silk from China and 
Manila in Japanese bottoms, while in the same year only 1,300 quintals were imported 
into Japan in the Portuguese Great Ship (ibid., p. 296). By this time the Portuguese— 
and likewise the interloping Dutch—were also feeling the effect* of an increasing Chinese 
competition in the silk trade between China and Japan (ibid., pp. 299-300). After the 
suppression, in a . d . 1633-6, of Japan's overseas trade in Japanese bottoms by the 
Tokugawa regime, and the permanent interdiction of Portuguese trade with Japan by 
the decree of the 5th July, 1639, Japan’s trade with China was carried on by the Chinese 
and the Dutch till it wet eventually killed by the establishment of a native silk industry 
in Japan (ibid., pp. 288-9). 

1 In the principality of Hirado in Kyushu Christianity was favoured on commercial 
considerations (Murdoch, op. cit., voL ii, p- 54), and, in general, the reception with 
which the Christian missionaries met at Japanese hands varied in accordance with 
Japanese estimates of the prestige of the missionaries in the eyes of the Portuguese mer¬ 
chants (ibid., p. 60; Boxer, op. cit.,p. 104). The parochial princelings competed with 
one another in trying to attract missionaries with a view to attracting trade (Murdoch, 
op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 82-83). This was also one potent motive for conversions, and 
apostasy followed when trade did not (ibid., p. 87). The daimyo of Hirado subsequently 
welcomed the Protestant Dutch and English traders who arrived in the wake of the 
Portuguese, because he preferred Western trade unencumbered with Western religion 
(ibid., pp. 470-1). Fear of losing Portuguese trade deterred Hideyoshi from pressing 
the execution of his edict of the 25th July, 1587, ordering Christian missionaries to 
leave Japan but allowing Portuguese business men to stay (ibid., pp. 243 and 252). 
Hideyoshi’s successor,Tokugawa Ieyasu, appointed Hideyoshi’s Jesuit interpreter Father 
Joio Rodriguez as his own commercial agent at Nagasaki for trading there on his account 
with the annual Portuguese ship (Boxer, op. cit., p. 182). 

In A.n. 1599 Ieyasu tried to attract Spanish trade to Japan en route from the Philippines 
to Mexico, and to obtain the services of Spanish shipwrights and miners (Murdoch, 
op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 458-9), but the Spaniards did not care to take up the commercial open¬ 
ings offered to them in the Kwanto (ibid., p. 463). In a treaty concluded on the 4th July, 
1610, with an ex-govcmor-gencral of the Philippines who had been shipwrecked on the 
coast of Japan in the preceding year, Ieyasu conceded far-reaching Spanish demands 
as his quid pro quo for obtaining the services of Spanish technicians. His aims were to 
develop Japan’s foreign trade, build up a Japanese merchant marine, and exploit Japan’s 
mineral resources (ibid., pp. 478-80). The offensive in breaking off commercial relations 
between Japan and the West was taken on the Western and not on the Japanese side. 
Circa a.d. 1614 the Japanese, together with all other foreigners, were forbidden to trade 
with the Spanish Viceroyalty of New Spain (ibid., p. 603), and Japanese efforts to obtain 
a relaxation of this veto were unsuccessful (ibid., p. 606). This previous rebuff of the 
Japanese by the Spaniards may go far to explain the anti-Spanish measures taken by 
the Bakufu in a.d. 1624 (see p. 323. n. 3, below). * See IV. iv. 93. 

J See Soothill, W. E.: China and the West (Oxford 1925, University Press), pp. 75- 
76. This scourge of Japanese, piracy at China’s expense continued to grow worse as, 
in Japan, the Time of Troubles approached its climax. The worst years of all were a.d. 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE FAR EAST 321 

the suppression of Japanese piracy by Hidcyoshi, 1 Japanese seamen fol¬ 
lowed the example of the Western new-comers by taking to trade, 2 they 
rapidly extended the range of their maritime activities over the Pacific 
as far afield as the Straits of Malacca in one direction 3 and the Spanish 
Viceroyalty of Mexico in another. 4 

The converse side of the picture was that, by the turn of the sixteenth 
and seventeenth centuries, a Japan whose political unification by indi¬ 
genous military force was then still incomplete and insecure had come to 
be perilously exposed to the danger of having political unity imposed on 
her from abroad at the eleventh hour, as it had been imposed on the 
Central American World, at the ruthless hands of alien conquistadores. 
The Spanish conquest of the Philippines in a . d . 1565-71, the union of 
the Portuguese with the Spanish Crown in a . d . 1581, and the Dutch 
conquest of Formosa in a . d . 1624 were object lessons of the fate which 
might befall another group of West Pacific islands with which the 
Portuguese had been in contact since the fifteen-forties. 5 By contrast, 


1*52-6. The business became international; for the Japanese pirates enlisted Chinese, 
Korean, Annamitc, Malay, and Portuguese recruits. A key role was played by Chinese 
collaborationists (Boxer, op. cit.. pp. 254-5). 

‘ The last raid by Japanese pirates on China was made in A.D. 1588 (Boxer, op. cit., 
p. 256). Thereafter, unemployed Japanese adventurers offered the Spanish authorities 
at Manila Japanese aid for an invasion of China, and the Spaniards did take Japanese 
mercenaries with them when they invaded Cambodia in a.d. 1595 (ibid., pp. 259-61). 

» While Japanese pirates had been raiding China, other Japanese had been flouting 
the Ming Imperial Government’s will in another way by trading with the Chinese. 
This trade had been started in the fifteenth century of the Christian Era by Japanese 
Zen Buddhist monasteries, and had afterwards been taken up by lay daimyo (Boxer, 
op. cit., pp. 249 - 5 ° » n <* * 53 )-. 

» A Japanese colony established itself at Manila between a.d. 1593 and a.d. 1614 
(Boxer, op. cit., p. 302), and during the first quarter of the seventeenth century of the 
Christian Era similar colonies of Japanese traders and mercenaries made their appear¬ 
ance at divers points in South-West Asia (ibid., pp. 296-7). 

* There were Japanese traders in Mexico in a.d. i 597 (Murdoch, J.: History of Japan, 
vol. ii (Kobe 190-3, Japan Chronicle), p. 292). Japanese traders were doing business all 
over the Pacific by the time when they were suddenly prohibited from engaging in 
foreign trade by the non-intercourse ordinance of the 23rd June, 1636 (ibid., p. 691). 

J As early as A.D. 1596 the Japanese had been put on their guard against Spanish 
imperialism by some unwary remarks from the lips of the pilot-major of a wrecked 
Spanish ship, the San Felipe. In explanation of the enormous extent of the Spanish 
Crown’s possessions—as displayed on a map of the World which he had shown to his 
Japanese interlocutors with an eye to overawing them—the imprudent Spaniard had 
declared that Spain’s first move towards getting possession of any non-Wcstcrn country 
on which she had political designs was to send missionaries to promote the formation 
of a native Christian party there which would serve, when the time came, as a spear¬ 
head for Spanish aggression (Boxer, op. cit., pp. 165-6) —and this fate might indeed 
have overtaken Japan (Murdoch, J.: History of Japan, vol. ii (Kobe 1903, Japan 
Chronicle), p. 437) if the political unification of Japan under an indigenous dictator¬ 
ship in A.D. 1590 had not been confirmed by the results of the Battle of Sekigchsra 
on the 21 st October, 1600, and the Battle of Osaka on the 3rd June, 1615; for, 
after the personal union of the Portuguese with the Spanish Crown in A.D. 1581, the 
Spanish Franciscan friars in the Philippines had taken the offensive against the Portu¬ 
guese Crown’s ecclesiastical padroado in Asia (Boxer, op. cit., pp. 155-6), and had 
entered the Japan mission field in rivalry with the Portuguese Jesuits with Hideyoshi’s 

S will (ibid., pp. 160-2), though in a.d. 1583 the Italian provincial of the Portuguese 
t mission in Japan, Valignano, had pleaded for the exclusion of other Catholic 
itian religious orders from Japan and had had his request granted both by King 
Philip and by the Vatican (in a bull of the 21st January, 1585) (ibid., pp. 156-60). 

Hideyoshi’s motives in welcoming the Franciscans had been to introduce a counter¬ 
poise to the influence of the Jesuits and to bring down the price of Chinese goods in 
Japan by stimulating a Spanish competition with the Portuguese middlemen in the 
trade between Japan and China; but the Japanese dictator had not reckoned with the 
Spanish Franciscans’ fanatical temper. To the Jesuits' dismay—though not to their 


B 2S98.vm 


M 



322 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
the vast sub-continent of China had nothing more to fear from the advent 
of Western pirates in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries than she 
had found to fear from the activities of Japanese pirates in the four¬ 
teenth and fifteenth centuries. 1 For China, such still unmechanized 
Early Modem Western sea-raiders, however annoying they might be, 
were not potential conquerors; the dangers that gave serious cause for 
anxiety to a Chinese Imperial Government in this age were the possibili¬ 
ties of domestic revolt and of overland invasion from the Eurasian 
Steppe beyond the Great Wall or from the Manchurian forests beyond 
the Willow Palisade; and, after an enfeebled indigenous Ming Dynasty 
had been duly supplanted by a vigorous semi-barbarian Manchu 
Dynasty in the course of the seventeenth century, a recurrence of the 
conjuncture of invasion and revolt which had brought the Manchus 
into the saddle did not present itself on the Chinese political horizon 
within the next two hundred years. 2 

surprise, for Valignano had predicted this in A.D. 1583 (ibid., p. 158)—the Spanish 
friars recklessly applied in Japan the drastic methods of propaganda which they had 
used with success in missions to primitive peoples (ibid., p. 162). They ministered to the 
poor (ibid., p. 233), whom the Jesuits in Japan had neglected (ibid., p. 228), and they 
avowedly aimed at nothing less than a mass conversion of the Japanese people to 
Christianity (ibid., p. 231). In short, the Spanish friars’ tactlessness opened the new 
Japanese central government’s eyes to the reality of the Spanish peril to Japan’s in¬ 
dependence, and Ieyaau put the Spanish lay residents in Japan and their associates the 
Franciscan missionaries under surveillance on the receipt of information that a Spanish 
expedition was on its way from Mexico for the conquest of the Moluccas (Murdoch, 
op. cit., vol. ii, p. 463). In A.D. 1612 the Spaniards started making a survey of the 
Japanese coasts, and Ieyasu’s English mentor Will Adams did not miss his opportunity 
of improving the occasion by enlarging on the implications for Japanese security that 
were to be seen in this Spanish move (ibid., p. 489). The moral was pointed by the 
detection of an intrigue between officials of Icyasu’s administration and Spanish agents 
in a.d. 1612-13 (ibid., p. 492). 

A domestic Pax Tokugatcica in Japan had indeed been so hardly won that the Bakufu 
was naturally on the alert to foresee and parry all possible threats to its preservation. 
On the eve of the promulgation of the decree of the 27th January, 1614 (sec p. 323, n. 
3, below), the Jesuit Father Carvalho gave it as his opinion that the Bakufu was afraid 
of some Christian daimyo’s attempting to wrest the supreme power in Japan out of 
Tokugawa hands with Spanish support (Boxer, op. cit., p. 311). The Japanese political 
authorities’ chief misgiving about Christianity—and this misgiving was felt by the 
daimyo as well as by the Bakufu—was that its claim on the allegiance of its Japanese 
converts might be a challenge to the claims of feudal loyalty—though in the event, 
when the converts’ steadfastness was put to the test by persecution, the percentage of 
-tmurai converts who remained faithful was much lower than the percentage of non- 
samurai converts, who had no feudal tics to make competing claims upon them (ibid., 
pp. 338-9 an d 362). Japanese converts to Christianity were not the only potentially 
subversive element* in a hardly pacified Japan at which the Bakufu looked askance. It 
was also afraid of the lordless (i.e. unemployed) samurai, the so-called ronin ; and this 
fear seems to have been the motive for the ban in a.d. 1621 upon foreign enlistment 

S ibid., p. 269), and for the ban in a.d. 1633-6 upon overseas trade in Japanese bottoms 
ibid., p. 272). _ 

> The behaviour of the Portuguese was on a par with that of the Japanese pirates in 
Chinese estimation (Fitzgerald, C. P.: China, a Short Cultural History (London 1935, 
Cresset Press), p. 471). On this account the Portuguese were corraled in a walled-off 
settlement at Macao in a.d. 1557 (ibid., p. 474), and the only Chinese port opened to 
Western traders was Canton—by contrast with the Chinese treatment of the earlier 
Arab, Persian, and Malay commercial travellers from overseas who, unlike the Western 
barbarians, had been considered sufficiently civilized to be allowed to circulate through¬ 
out China without restrictions (ibid., p. 470). It is significant that Matteo Ricci, who 
was a missionary and not a trader and who had taken the trouble to make himself an 
adept in the Sinic literary culture, was allowed by the Emperor to reside in Peking in 
spite of opposition from the Board of Rites (ibid., pp. 475-6). 

* In the great war between the Manchu Far Eastern universal state and the steppe 
empire of the Zungars in the sixth decade of the eighteenth century of the Christian Era, 
the political stake was the fate of Zungaria only, and not the fate of China (sec lll.iii. 19). 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE FAR EAST 323 
This difference in the geographico-political situations of China and 
Japan in the Early Modern Age of Western oceanic expansion goes far 
towards explaining why it was that in China the repression of Roman 
Catholic Christianity was postponed till the turn of the seventeenth 
and eighteenth centuries of the Christian Era and was the outcome, not 
of any apprehensive calculations in the field of power politics, but of 
an academic controversy over a point of theological terminology 1 —in 
contrast to the comparative promptness and ruthlessness of the suppres¬ 
sion of Roman Catholic Christianity in Japan, and the final cutting of all 
but one solitary Dutch thread in the nexus between Japan and the 
Western World of the day. The succession of blows delivered by a newly 
established Japanese Central Government began with Hideyoshi’s 
ordinance of the 25th July, 1587, decreeing the banishment from 
Japan of Western Christian missionaries, 2 and culminated in the 
ordinances of a.d. 1636 and 1639, 3 forbidding Japanese subjects to 

1 See V. v. 365-7 and 539, and V. vi. 13-24. 

* Sec Murdoch, J.: History of Japan, vol. ii (Kobe 1903, Japan Chronicle), p. 243; 
Boxer, op. cit., pp. 147-8. It is significant that Hideyoshi should have fired this first 
shot in his anti-Western campaign as early as a.d. 1587; for, though his subjugation, in 
that year, of the principality of Satsuma on the island of Kyushu had brought him within 
sight of his goal of imposing a pax oeeumenica on the Japanese World, his establish¬ 
ment of a Japanese universal state was not actually completed before his conquest of 
the Kwantd in a.d. 1590 (see Murdoch, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 222-234 and 258; 
Sansom, G. B.: Japan, A Short Cultural History (London 1932, Cresset Press), 

i 1 >ce ilurdoch, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 636 and 664; Boxer, op. cit., pp. 372 and 384. 
The first martyrdoms were inflicted on the 5th February, 1507, when, as a retort to the 
threat implied in the pilot-major of the San Felipe's indiscreet avowal, twenty-six 
Christians (consisting of six Westem-born Franciscans and twenty Japanese converts) 
were put to death (Murdoch, op. cit., vol. cit., pp. 280 and 295; Sansom, G. B .-.Japan, 
A Short Cultural History (London 1932, Cresset Press), p. 413; Boxer, op. cit., p. 166). 
The extirpation of Christianity in Japan began in a.d. 1612 (Murdoch, op. cit., vol. 
cit., p. 487; Sansom, op. cit., pp. 416-17). After Hideyoshi’s successor Tokugawa 
Ieyasu had received an unfavourable report on Christianity from an investigator whom 
he had commissioned to inauire into it (Murdoch, op. cit., vol. cit., p. 499), an edict 
ordering the suppression of Christianity in Japan was issued by him on the 27th January’, 
1614 (ibid., p. 503; Boxer, op. cit., pp. 317-19). This decree required all Japanese 
subjects to enrol themselves in one or other of the Japanese Mahayanian Buddhist 
churches, and the Buddhist priests were made responsible for keeping watch over their 
parishioners’ orthodoxy (Boxer, op. cit., pp. 318-19). The prospect of persecution 
evoked an outburst of religious fervour in the Christian community at Nagasaki in May, 
1614 (ibid., pp. 323-4). Yet, though 47 Western fathers (27 of them Jesuits) and more 
than too Japanese Jesuit lay brothers (dojoku) disobeyed the order for their banishment 
in the decree of a.d. 1614 by staying on in Japan tub rota (ibid., p. 327), no single 
foreigner was put to death in Japan on account of his religion so long as Ieyasu (omit 
a.d. 1616) remained alive (ibid., p. 331). In A.D. 1617 one Western Dominican and one 
Western Augustinian in Japan courted martyrdom, for the sake of sharing the Japanese 
Christian martyrs’ fate (ibid., pp. 332-3). Some Western priest* remained in hiding in 
Japan for twenty years (ibid., p. 336). From a.d. 1613 to a.d. 1618 the Japanese author¬ 
ities turned a blind eye to violations of the ban on Christianity (ibid., pp. 331-2), and, 
in particular, Hasegawa Gonroku, who from A.D. 1615 to a.d. 1626 was governor of 
Nagasaki, the centre of the Christian community in Japan, did his utmost to avoid having 
to make martyrs (ibid., pp. 345-6). When martyrdoms were inflicted, the authorities 
did not prevent the Christians mom making mass-demonstrations of their feelings (ibid., 
pp. 342-3)* According to Murdoch (op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 618-23), there was a crescendo 
of martyrdoms during the years a.d. 1617-22. The return, probably in a.d. 1622, of an 
emissary, Ibi Masayoshi, who had been sent by the Bakufu to inspect the Westerners’ 
European homeland (ibid., p. 62a), was followed in a.d. 1624-5 by edicts expelling all 
Spaniards from Japan and forbidding Japanese subjects to trade with any foreign coun¬ 
try, particularly with Spain, Mexico, and the Philippines (ibid., p. 626; Boxer, op. cit., 
P- . 439 , n. 1). The systematic enforcement of the decree of a.d. 1614 by methods of 
frightfulness’ did not begin till after the accession of Icmitsu to the Shogunate in a.d. 
1623 (Boxer, op. cit., p. 362). The years a.d. 1626-36 witnessed the apostasy of the great 



324 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
continue to travel abroad and Portuguese subjects to continue to reside 
in Japan. 1 

Chinese and Japanese Reactions to the Impact of a Late Modern West 
In Japan, as in China, the eventual abandonment of a self-imposed 
insulation from contact with the West was initiated from below up¬ 
wards, and was inspired by a hunger to taste the forbidden fruits of 
Modern Western scientific knowledge before this disinterested intel¬ 
lectual quest was conscripted into the service of a political movement for 
mastering the practical applications of the knowledge through which 
the Westerners had latterly been acquiring an unprecedented economic 
and military power. Like the early seventeenth-century Japanese de¬ 
majority of the Western Catholic missionaries’ Japanese converts (ibid., p. 360), who in 
a.d. 1614 had numbered some 300,000 out of a total population of some 20,000,000 
(ibid., pp. 230 and 320-1). 

The ordinance of the 23rd June, 1636, reaffirmed and made absolute, under pain of 
death, ordinances of a.d. 1633-4 forbidding even licensed Japanese ships to continue 
to engage in foreign trade without special permits, and debarring Japanese residents 
abroad from returning home; and the new decree also forbade Portuguese residents and 
their issue to continue to reside in Japan or to return thither (Murdoch, op. cit., vol. ii, 
p. 636). The Bakufu set itself to make the veto on foreign trade effective by prescribing 
a maximum tonnage for Japanese merchant ships and laying down specifications for their 
construction (ibid., p. 693)- 0 ° the 22nd October, 1636, Portuguese residents and their 
property were duly deported, and thenceforth Portuguese trade with Japan had to be 
conducted under close restrictions (ibid., p. 637). The final step was precipitated by an 
insurrection—provoked by the tyranny of a local daimyo—which broke out on the 17th 
December. 1637, on the Shimebara Peninsula in Kyushu and which was not suppressed 
till the insurgents’ stronghold, Hara Castle, was stormed by the Bakufu’s forces on the 
1 ilh April, 1638. Thirty-seven thousand Japanese Christians are said to have re-emerged, 

joined the insurgents, and lost their lives in this affair (Sansom, op. cit., p. 431; Boxer, 
op. cit., p. 361). The decree of the 5th July, 1639, forbidding all intercourse with the 
Portuguese, was promulgated in consequence (Boxer, op. dt., p. 384; Murdoch, op.dt., 
vol. dt., p. 664). Portuguese ships arriving in Japan in a.d. 1639 were refused admittance 
(ibid., p. 664). On the 6th July, 1640, a Portuguese expostulatory embassy arrived at 
Nagasaki (ibid., p. 663). On the 3rd August, 1640, the four Portuguese ambassadors and 
fifty-seven of their companions were put to death, while thirteen survivors were sent back 
to Macao to convey to the Portuguese authorities a message from the Japanese Govern¬ 
ment: 'Let them think no more of us, as if we were no longer in the World’(ibid., p. 667). 

It did not prove so easy to extirpate the remnant of the native Catholic Christian com¬ 
munity in Japan. One effect of the persecution was to disperse the community from 
North-Western Kyushu, where it had originally been concentrated (Boxer, op. cit., p. 
322), to north-eastern districts of the Main Island to which the Western missionaries 
had never penetrated (ibid., pp. 335 and 358). The last martyrdoms were inflicted in 
a.d. 1856, and the last punishments, short of death, in a.d. 1867. Even after the Western¬ 
izing revolution of a.d. t868, the new regime posted notices declaring: 'The evil sect of 
Christians is forbidden as heretofore’. The ordinance of A.D. 1614 was never formally 
rescinded, but after A.D. 1873 the notices were withdrawn, and the Japanese Christians 
then in prison on account of their religion were released and indemnified, because the 
new regime had come to realize that this was a condition line qua non for obtaining the 
Western Powers’ consent to a modification of the capitulatory treaties (Sansom, G. B.: 
The Wettem World and Japan (London 1950. Cresset Press), pp. 408-10). By this time 
the remnant of a Japanese Catholic Christendom had been holding out under severe 
persecution for longer than a quarter of a millennium. 

1 For the expulsion from Japan of all Westerners except the Dutch between a.d. 1614 
and a.d. 1638, see II. ii. 366, n. 2. For the humiliations inflicted on the Dutch ghetto- 
dwellers on the islet of Deshima from a.d. 1641 to a.d. 1838, see II. ii. 232-3. The 
methods of ‘frightfulness’ by which the Japanese eliminated the Western residents and 
the Japanese converts to Western Christianity in their midst, and deterred the West, 
for more than two centuries to come, from making any further attempts to break down 
Japan’s self-imposed isolation, had their counterpart in the contemporary conduct of 
Westerners in at least one recently Western-occupied adjacent Far Eastern country. In 
a.d. 1602, and again in A.D. 1639, the Spaniards provided for the security of their 
dominion over Manila by massacring the Chinese residents there (Soothill, W. E.: 
China and the West (Oxford, 1925, University Press), p. 84). 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE FAR EAST 325 
votccs to a Roman Catholic Western Christianity, the early nineteenth- 
century Japanese devotees to a Modern Western secular science 
demonstrated their sincerity by exposing themselves to the risk of 
meeting the tragic ends that eventually overtook them, at a moment of 
darkness before dawn, in the proscriptions of a.d. 1840 and a.d. 1850.' 

The Tokugawa regime signalized the last years of its existence by 
banning all Dutch studies outside the field of medicine; 2 and, from the 
Bakufu's standpoint, the only thing wrong about this repressive policy 
was its impracticability. Yet this welling up of a disinterested intel¬ 
lectual curiosity concerning the achievements of a Modern Western 
science was an indirect outcome of the Bakufu’s own cultural policy. In 
their anxiety to conserve their arduously attained achievement of freez¬ 
ing Japanese life into immobility on the once feverishly agitated military 
and political planes, the Tokugawa had wisely looked for alternative 
vents for unabated Japanese energies, and they had encouraged the 
pursuit of learning as one innocuous outlet. The mental discipline that 
they had favoured had been the cultivation of a Ncoconfucianism 
which was the legacy of the intellectual renaissance of the Sung Age in 
China; 3 but it proved impossible for a reactionary rdgime in Japan at the 


» See Murdoch, J.: History ojJapan, vol. iii (London 1926, Kegan Paul), p. 563. 
During the hundred years preceding the crisis of a.d. i 853-68. both private and official 
circles in Japan were torn in two between feelings of curiosity and feelings of xenophobia 
as a [result of their gradually increasing awareness of a renewal of pressure on Japan 
from the Western World (including Russia under her Petrine regime); and the conflict 
between these incompatible Japanese psychological reactions expressed itself in an 
inconsequent jumble of 'Zealot' and 'Herodian' gestures. 

The . fapancse physicians who had mastered the secrets of Dutch medical science 
incurred the jealousy of their Chinese-trained colleagues (ibid., p. 559 ). whose feelings 
towards them were much like those of the Egyptian physicians at the court of the 
Achacmenian Emperor Darius I when they were put out of countenance by the super¬ 
iority of their interloping Hellenic confrere D«moc«d£» (Herodotus, Book III, chaps. 

S i). In a.d. 1784 a Japanese named Tanuma was assassinated on account of his 
vity to intercourse with Westerners (Murdoch, op. cat., vol. iii, p. 505); and, per- 
n reaction to a scries of descents on the Japanese coasts by Russian and British 
ships in the course of the years A.D. 1804-1 1 (ibid., pp. 511-22), a number of precaution¬ 
ary measures were taken by the Bakufu. During the years a.d. 1809-17 the Dutch ghetto 
on Dcshima was marooned (ibid., p. 523). In A.D. 1S24 the standing orders for the ex¬ 
pulsion of foreigners landing in Japan were renewed (ibid., p. 528). In a.d. 1829 von 
Siebold (see p. 326, n. 1, below) was banished from Japan on a charge of having ob¬ 
tained possession of Japanese maps and other documents (ibid., p. 558). An embassy 
from the Dutch Crown was rebuffed in a.d. 1844 (ibid., p. 530). 

On the other hand in A.D. 1786 the Bakufu began to explore the island of Yezo 
(Hokkaido) with a view to forestalling an apprehended Russian encroachment there 
(ibid., p. 513). In a.d. 1809 they ordered the Japanese interpreters in Nagasaki to add 
to their repertory of foreign languages, hitherto confined to Dutch, by learning English 
and Russian (ibid., p. 548). Between a.d. 1809 and a.d. 18:7 the Dutch agent on 
Deshima compiled a Dutch-Japancsc lexicon at the Bakufu’s request (ibid., p. 550). 
The apprehensions aroused in Japan by the spectacle of China's helplessness in the 
Sino-British war of A.D. 1839-42 moved the Bakufu to tolerate the activities of Taka- 
shima and his disciple Sakuma, who devoted their lives to mastering the contemporary 
Western technology of gunnery with an eye to the defence of Japan's coasts against 
Western naval attack. Yet the ‘Zealots) managed to have Takashima imprisoned and pre¬ 
vented from continuing his work until after Commodore Perry’s first visitation in A.D. 
1853 (Sansom, G. B.: The Western World and Japan (London 1950, Cresset Press), 
pp. 262-72). During the years a.d. 1851-8 the Bakufu winked at commercial intercourse 
between the Japanese fief of Satsuma and France via the Luchu Islands, which were a 


dependency of Satsuma dejaeto (Murdoch, op. cit., vol. iii, p. 534). 
1 See Murdoch, op. cit., vol. cit., pp. 564-5. 

1 See Murdoch, op. cit., vol. cit., pp. 97-100; Sansom, G.'.Japa 
History (London 1932, Cresset Press), pp. 47 ® »nd 492-3 ; eundem: 
and Japan (London 1950, Cresset Press), pp. 195-8 and 218-20. 



3 z 6 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to permit its subjects to 
supplement their authorized cultivation of a conservative vein of indi¬ 
genous thought by making a strictly utilitarian study of Modern Western 
medicine without thereby opening a passage for the mighty flood of 
Modern Western knowledge in its entirety, 1 as it was to prove impossible 
for the Ottoman autocrat ‘Abd-al-Hamld II at the turn of the nineteenth 
and twentieth centuries to allow his military cadets to make a strictly 
utilitarian study of the Modern Western art of war without exposing the 
old order to the risk of being swept away by an influx of the political 
Ideas of 1789. 1 

While the inspiration of the nineteenth-century Japanese Westerniza¬ 
tion movement from below upwards thus came from Modern Western 
secular scientific thought, the inspiration of the corresponding and 
contemporary movement in China came from Modern Western Pro¬ 
testant Christianity, whose missionaries accompanied the British and 
American salesmen of the wares of an industrialized West, 1 as in the 
sixteenth century the missionaries of a Tridcntinc Roman Catholic 
Christianity had accompanied the Portuguese pioneers of Early Modern 

1 An embargo on the translation of Western books into Japanese had been lifted in 
A.D. 1720 (Sansom, The Western World and Japan, p. 214; Murdoch, J.: History of 
Japan, vol. iii (London 1926, Kegan Paul), p. 498); and, in this matter of cultural policy, 
some latitude was allowed by the Bakufu to its feudatories. While a reactionary Shin¬ 
toism was being inculcated in Mito, Dutch learning was being cultivated in Sakura 

V In the' ficf of { ' onezawa, Western medicine was introduced by the Daimyo Uycsugi 
half a century before the advent of Commodore Perry (ibid., p. jyi). In a.d. 1771 bugitu 
Gcmpaku, a Japanese physician in a daimyo’s service, was excited by coming across 
some Dutch works on anatomy (ibid., p. 543). Sugita and two other Japanese physicians 
thereupon agreed with one another to learn Dutch; and they puzzled out the meaning 
of a Dutch anatomy book by using the diagrams as clues (ibid., p. 544; Sansom, op. cit., 
p. 217) with the patience and ingenuity which nineteenth-century Western scholars were 
to employ, two or three generations later, in deciphering cuneiform. Thereafter, several 

6 'anese doctors obtained instruction, circa a.d. 1773. from a Swedish resident on 
shima named Thunberg (Murdoch, op. cit., vol. iii, pp. 340 and 343) and then from 
Isaac Titsingh, who was in charge of the Dutch factory on Dcshima at divers times 
ranging from a.d. 1779 to a.d. 1785 (Sansom, op. cit., p. 2:8). A German scientist, 
P. J. von Siebold, who was in Japan during the years a.d. 1823-9, was visited at Naga¬ 
saki by students from all over the country who, after returning to their homes, used to 
submit to their Western instructor medical dissertations written in Japanese (ibid., pp. 
262 and 274; Murdoch, op. cit., vol. iii, p. 55 *)- 
Meanwhile, Japanese curiosity concerning Western thought had not remained con¬ 
fined to the field of medical studies. An interest in mathematics, astronomy, and carto¬ 
graphy, which had begun to show itself in Japan as early as a.d. 1684, had led to a study 
there of learned works by Jesuit fathers in Chinese (ibid., pp. 553-4); and this wider 
range of interest was stimulated by Titsingh, who studied Japanese literature, established 
personal relations with members of the Japanese governing class, and kept up a corre¬ 
spondence with them (ibid., pp. 502-4 and 507)—an intimacy which would hardly have 
been possible in the years A.D. 1690-2, when the German traveller Engclbrecht Kacmp- 
fer found that it was the policy of the Bakufu to prevent the Dutch from learning 
Japanese, though they failed to prevent Knempfer from transmitting an intellectual 
current in the opposite direction by giving his Japanese attendant instruction in the 
Dutch language and in contemporary Western medicine (ibid., pp. 539 and 542). At 
Yedo, ‘down-town’ and ‘up-town’ clubs for the study of Western learning had sprung 
up during the first half of the nineteenth century, and by a.d. 1850 fifty-two Dutch 
works had been translated into Japanese by Takano Nagohide, alias Choei (ibid., pp. 
339-60). Both Takano and his friend and confederate Watanabe Noboru, alias Kwazan, 
were eventually harried by persecution into committing suicide (Sansom, op. cit., pp. 
273-80). 

* See pp. 234-6, above. 

* Morrison, the first Protestant missionary to work in China, landed at Canton in 
a.d. 1802 (Soothill, W. E.: China and ike West (Oxford 1925, University Press), p. 98). 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE FAR EAST 327 
Western commercial enterprise in the Far East. In another context' we 
have noticed that the T’aip’ing politico-religious insurrectionary move¬ 
ment, which came near to overthrowing the Manchu regime in the sixth 
and seventh decades of the nineteenth century , 2 was not merely a 
‘Zealot’ indigenous revolt against the tincture of an exotic Far Western 
Christian culture in the tradition of a semi-barbarian Manchu ‘ascen¬ 
dancy’, but was also, in another aspect, a translation of Protestant 
Western Christianity into indigenous Far Eastern terms . 3 Thereafter, 
in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, the Chinese initiators of 
a movement for secular political reform were likewise influenced by 
Protestant Western missionaries ; 4 Sun Yat-sen, the founder of the 
Kuomintang, was the son of a Protestant Christian father ; 5 and another 
Protestant Christian Chinese family played a paramount part in the 
Kuomintang’s subsequent history in the persons of Madame Sun Yat- 
sen, her sister Madame Chiang Kai-shek, and their brother T. V. Soong. 

Thus, from the outset, the nineteenth-century Chinese Westernizing 
movement differed from its Japanese counterpart in having a Protestant 
Christian instead of a secular scientific Western inspiration; and the two 
movements also rapidly diverged on the political plane. Both movements 
were confronted with the formidable task of having to liquidate and 
replace a well-established indigenous oecumenical regime which had 
demonstrated its unfitness to survive by showing itself insensitive to 
the imperative need for coping with the impact of an irresistibly power¬ 
ful secularized Modern Western Civilization; but in this political 
emergency the Japanese Westernizers were more alert, more prompt, 
and more efficient than the Chinese. Within fifteen years of the first 
appearance of Commodore Perry’s squadron in Japanese territorial 
waters in a.d. 1853, the Japanese Westernizers had not only overthrown 
a Tokugawa regime that had failed to rise to the urgent occasion; they 

« See V. V. 107, XIX, and 1:7. 

* At their flood tide the T aip’ing managed to push an advance-guard of seven 
thousand men to within twenty miles of Tientsin (Fitzgerald, C. P.: China, A Short 
Cultural History (London 1935, Cresset Press), p. 569). 

J The T’ai P’ing movement... was primarily a religious revival and only secondarily 
a revolt against the Manchus’ (Fitzgerald, C. P.: China, A Short Cultural History 
(London 1915, Cresset Press), p. 566). The T’aip’ing were friendly to the West, and it 
was their policy to throw the whole of China open to the Westerners instead of keeping 
them confined to the Treaty Ports (ibid., pp. <>70-1); yet the French and British had 
no sooner imposed their own terms on the Manchu Imperial Government at Peking 
in the wars of a.d. 1857-60 than they perversely supplied the conservative Manchus 
with the military means of suppressing a spontaneous Chinese Westernizing movement 
which the Imperial Government had proved unable to crush out of its own resources 
(ibid., pp. 571-2). It will be seen that this decisive Franco-British intervention in China 
in favour of the Imperial Government and against the T’aip’ing in the seventh decade 
of the nineteenth century was in this respect analogous to the similarly decisive inter¬ 
vention of Great Britain, Russia, Prussia, and the Hapsburg Monarchy in the Ottoman 
Empire in favour of Sultan MahmOd II and against Mehmed ‘Ali in A.D. 1839-41. The 
frustration of the T’aip’ing movement was a tragic episode in the history of the encounter 
between China and the Modem West; for the author of the movement, the Hakka Hung 
Hsiu-ch’uan, was making a second attempt at the enterprise—previously attempted by 
the Jesuits without ultimate success—of initiating China into the Modern Western cul¬ 
ture in its Christian entirety and not just in a technological abstract. In itself, Hung’s 
attempt was the more promising of the two, since it emanated, not from alien mission¬ 
aries, but from a Chinese prophet, and proceeded, not from above downwards, but from 
below upwards. 

* For the influence of the missionaries Allen and Richard in that generation, see 

Soothill, op. dt., p. 173. * See Soothill, op. cic., p. 175. 



328 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
had achieved the far more difficult feat of installing in its place a new 
regime capable of putting into operation a comprehensive Westernizing 
movement from above downwards. The Chinese took 118 years to 
accomplish even the negative political result that the Japanese achieved 
in fifteen. The arrival of Lord Macartney’s Embassy at Peking in a.d. 
1793 was no less illuminating a demonstration of the formidably en¬ 
hanced potency of the Western Civilization than the arrival of Com¬ 
modore Perry’s squadron in Ycdo Bay sixty years later; yet in China 
the overthrow of the ancien regime did not follow till A.D. 1911, and the 
discarded universal state was then replaced, not by any effective new 
Westernizing political order, but by a familiar anarchy which the 
Kuomintang lamentably failed to overcome during the quarter of a 
century (a.d. 1923-48) which this twentieth-century' Chinese Westerniz¬ 
ing movement had at its disposal for showing whether it was capable of 
living up to its professed ideals and carrying out its declared programme. 1 

Since the nineteenth-century shock that jolted both Far Eastern 
peoples out of their ruts was the impact of new high-powered Western 
armaments carried by British warships in the war of a.d. 1S39-42 and 
by American warships in the visitations of a.d. 1853-4, a nineteenth- 
century Japan’s flying start over a nineteenth-century China in a race 
towards the goal of political and economic Westernization can be 
measured by the degree of Japan’s military superiority over China during 
the fifty years running from the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war of 
a.d. 1894-5. During that half-century China was militarily at Japan’s 
mercy; and, though, in the last round of this struggle, an effective con¬ 
quest of the whole of China proved to be beyond Japan’s resources, it 
was equally evident that, if the Japanese war-machine had not been 
shattered in the Second World War by the United States, the Chinese 

1 A comparison, which is as illuminating as it is objective, between the Chinese and 
the Japanese response to the identical challenge presented to both branches of the Far 
Eastern Society by the impact of a Late Modem Western Civilization is made by Hu 
Shih in The Chinese Renaissance: The Haskell Lectures . 1933 (Chicago 1934, University 
Press), chap. 1. The Chinese philosopher's conclusion is that 'there are various types 
of cultural response, of which the Japanese type may be called one of "centralized con¬ 
trol", and the Chinese type one of “diffused penetration and permeation'” (ibid., p. 27). 
In seeking to account for Japan's relative success, by comparison with the relative failure 
of China’s corresponding contemporary efforts, in responding to the challenge from the 
West in the first chapter of an episode that was common to the history of both countries, 
Hu Shih puts his finger (ibid., p. 5) on three assets that Japan possessed, and China 
lacked, at the time. The first of these was an old, experienced, ana powerful aristocratic 
ruling class; the second was a military tradition, kept alive in that class, which gave 
Japan the spirit to hold her own in the arena of a militaristic Western World (in contrast 
to the prevailing tradition in China, where the military virtues had remained under a 
cloud ever since they had been discredited by the paroxysm of militarism by which an 
antecedent Sinic Civilization had been convulsed during a Time of Troubles ending in 
the establishment of a Sinic universal state by Ts’in She Hwang-ti). The third Japanese 
asset to which Hu Shih draws attention is the fact that, by the time of the cultural 
revolution in Japan in and after the seventh decade of the nineteenth century of the 
Christian Era, the Imperial Dynasty had already been reigning without governing for 
at least a thousand years, and had thereby automatically acquired a cumulative aura 
of venerability which was not tarnished by any of the odium that is inevitably incurred 
by political authorities who wield effective power. Hence, when, in a.d. 1868, the Japan¬ 
ese Imperial House was brought out of cold storage, it was admirably 'suited to be made 
into a constitutional monarchy after the European pattern' (ibid., p. 19). Hu Shih gives 
interesting illustrations of the disadvantage at which China found herself in this age, by 
comparison with Japan, for want of these three political instruments for dealing with 
the impact of the West (ibid., pp. 5-23). 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE FAR EAST 329 
would never have been able, unaided, to wrest back out of the Japanese 
invaders’ hands the captured ports, industrial areas, and railroads that 
were the keys to the Westernization of China and that were vital to 
China’s economy in the ratio of their rarity in China at this date. 

Moreover, Japan’s facile, albeit inconclusive, victories over China 
were the cheapest of the trophies with which a latter-day Japanese 
militarism adorned a triumphal progress that carried it, within a span of 
fifty years, to its ironical goal of an utter military and political disaster 
without precedent in Japanese history. Between a.d. 1894 and a.d. 1945 
Japan extracted military dividends from a process of technological 
Westernization with a virtuosity that eclipsed the achievements of 
Petrine Russia between her victory in the Great Northern War of a.d. 
1 70 1-21 and her defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of a.d. 1904-5. In 
this trial of strength at the opening of the twentieth century of the 
Christian Era between one non-W r cstern people that, by that date, had 
been in process of Westernization for more than two hundred years and 
another non-W r estern people that had been treading the same road for 
less than half a century, a victorious Japan won recognition as a Great 
Power in the Western comity of states, as a victorious Russia had won 
the same recognition, some two hundred years earlier, in her trial of 
strength with the Sweden of King Charles XII. Thereafter, Japan 
achieved the tour de force of making herself one of the three leading naval 
Powers in a twentieth-century world in which naval strength was a func¬ 
tion of industrial potency in terms of a W’estern industrial technique; 
and her final fling was to smite the United States Navy in Pearl Harbour 
and overrun all the colonial possessions of the Western Powers in South- 
East Asia, from the Philippines to Malaya and Sumatra inclusive, in the 
course of a suicidal leap into the jaws of disaster. 

These jaws were the common destination at which a Japanese hare 
and a Chinese tortoise had arrived simultaneously by the beginning of 
the second half of the twentieth century. At that date Japan was still 
lying passive under a foreign military occupation to which she had sub¬ 
mitted by an act of unconditional surrender, while China, after she had 
robbed herself of the benefits of her liberation from the scourge of 
Japanese militarism by subjecting her tormented body social to the 
self-inflicted flagellation of a fresh civil war, had promptly proceeded to 
rob herself of the benefits of domestic pacification under the iron hand 
of a victorious Communist regime 1 by embroiling herself in a new 
foreign war in which she was not the victim but the aggressor, and in 
which she was fighting, not Japan, but those Western Powers that had 
so recently extricated her from Japan’s clutches. Japan’s plight was with¬ 
out precedent in the annals of an archipelago which had never before 
been invaded with success since the arrival of the Japanese people’s own 
ancestors from overseas before the dawn of recorded Japanese history. 
China’s plight might look at first sight more familiar, considering how 
many times in the course of her long history a bout of anarchy had ended 

1 The Chinese Communists won their decisive military victories over the Kuomin- 
tang in the autumn and early winter of a.d. 1948. The Communist People’s Republic 
of China was inaugurated on the 30th September, 1949. 

B 2608 .VIU M 2 


330 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
at last in a dictatorial reimposition of domestic peace through the triumph 
of a revolutionary regime. Even the alien origin of her new Communist 
rulers’ ideology had its precedents in the tincture of Protestant Western 
Christianity in the T’aip’ing and the coating of post-Christian Western 
Liberalism on the Kuomintang. Yet China’s plight likewise was novel at 
least in the points that, in embarking on a foreign war in Korea against 
the Western Community of Nations after having fought a culminating 
Chinese civil war in which the belligerents had been the Communists 
and the Kuomintang, China had become successively a battlefield and 
a belligerent in a world-wide conflict between two contending ideologies 
which were both of non-Chinese provenance. 

The Unsolved Problem of a Rising Pressure of Population 

What was the explanation of this uniformly disastrous ending of the 
first phase of the second encounter between these two Far Eastern 
societies and the Modern West? In both China and Japan the disaster 
had its root in a common Asiatic and East European unsolved problem 
which has come to our attention already in our survey of the encounter 
between the Modern West and the Hindu World. 1 2 What was to be the 
effect of the Western Civilization’s impact on economically still primitive 
peasant populations which had been accustomed for ages to breed up to 
the limits of bare subsistence at a level only just above the starvation line, 
and which were now being inoculated with a novel discontent through 
a dawning awareness of the possibilities opened up by the progxcss of 

Western technology for an improvement in the conditions of human life 
—but this without having yet begun to face the hard fact that these possi¬ 
bilities could become practical opportunities for them only at the price 
of an economic, a social, and, above all, a psychological revolution ? In 
order to tap the bounty of Amalthea’s horn, these hide-bound peasants 
would have to revolutionize their traditional methods of land-utilization 
and systems of land-tenure and to regulate the number of their births. 
Here were conflicting ideals whose conflict was bound to breed disasters 
so long as it remained unresolved; and a disaster which, mid-way 
through the twentieth century, wasstill in theoffing for India, had by then 
already overtaken the two contemporary societies in the Far East. 

The operation of this factor in the history of Japan since the Meiji 
Revolution of a.d. 1868 was particularly conspicuous. The complete 
military and political stabilization and partial economic stabilization of 
Japanese life under the Tokugawa dispensation had been possible 
because there was a basis of demographic stability underpinning them. 
During the Tokugawa period the population of Japan had been kept 
stationary artificially by divers means. 1 When the Tokugawa regime was 
liquidated, an unnaturally frozen Japanese body social thawed out; 

1 See pp. 213-16, above, and pp. 684-9, below. 

2 From circa a.d. 1725 to circa a.D. 1850 the figure was always something between 
twenty-eight and thirty millions according to Sansom, G. B.: Japan, A Short Cultural 
History (London 1932, Cresset Press), p. 458. By the middle of the eighteenth century, 
infanticide and abortion had become regular practices among the Japanese peasantry, 
and they do not appear to have been eradicated by being officially prohibited, as they 
were in a.d. 1767 (ibid., p. 508). 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE FAR EAST 331 
there was a general release of pent-up social forces, in the field of family 
life as well as in the fields of economics, politics, and war; and the silent 
lapse of the previous restrictions on the increase of population proved 
in the event to be a more revolutionary change than the political and 
economic revolutions which caught the World’s attention at the time. 

Unlike the contemporary changes on the political and economic 
planes, the resumption in Japan of unrestricted breeding was not an 
effect of any Western influence but was a reversion to the traditional 
mores of a primitive peasant society which had been put under restraint, 
by a psychological tour de force, in the glacial atmosphere of the Toku- 
gawa Age. The contemporary technological Westernization of Japan did, 
however, accentuate the practical effect of this relapse into a primitive 
habit by lowering a death-rate whose height, in societies not equipped 
with Modern Western preventive medicine and public hygiene, had 
normally moderated the effects of a high birth-rate on the movement of 
population. The consequent net increase of the population in Japan 
after the Meiji Revolution was comparable to its net increase in India 
after the establishment there of the British Raj; and in Japan the result¬ 
ing pressure of population on the means of subsistence made itself felt 
still more quickly and more acutely owing to the complete absence there 
of any reserves of cultivable land, the dearth of raw materials for industry 
(a dearth which was specially stringent in respect of coal and iron-ore), 
and the people’s traditionally higher average standard of living and 
consequently higher expectations in an era of Westernization . 1 

A Westernizing Japan might not have been so hard beset by these 
economic embarrassments if she had not drawn back at the last moment 
from taking the plunge at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth 
centuries of the Christian Era. If Japan had made her entry into the 
comity of Western nations at that date, she would doubtless have 
acquired a substantial share of the then still virgin lands in the South 
Seas and along the western coasts of the Americas that were subsequently 
occupied by settlers from Spain and from the British Isles during the 
lost two centuries and a quarter of Japan’s self-imposed insulation. The 
once untenanted terrestrial paradises that had meanwhile become 
California and New South Wales would have been ideal colonizing 
grounds for a Japanese people that was so ‘allergic’ to alien climates that 
it found Hokkaido forbiddingly arctic and Formosa forbiddingly 
tropical. By the third quarter of the nineteenth century, when the ocean- 
faring Western peoples had had nearly four hundred years’ grace for 
exploring and occupying the face of the planet without serious competi¬ 
tion from any other society, these options were no longer open to a 
tardily awakened Japanese Sleeping Beauty. For a Japan who, in 
abandoning the Toitugawan limitation of births, had condemned herself 
to a choice between expanding in some form or exploding, the only two 
alternative forms of expansion that were practical politics in the Meiji 
Era were either to persuade the rest of the World to trade with her or to 
conquer additional territory, resources, and markets by force of arms 

1 For the increase of the economic pressure on the life of the Japanese peasantry after 
a.d. 1868, see Sansom, op. cit., pp. 506 segq. 



332 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
from existing owners who were militarily too weak to defend their 
property against a militarily Westernized Japan’s aggression. 

Between a.d. 1S68 and a.d. 1931 Japanese foreign policy oscillated 
uneasily between these two cardinal points of her political compass. The 
Japanese Liberals counted on the maintenance and expansion of a 
market for the relatively cheap products of efficiently managed Japanese 
textile and other light industries among vast peasant populations in 
Asia and Africa who were acquiring an appetite for the facilities and 
amenities of the Modern Western way of life but who could not afford 
the price of West European and North American manufactures. The 
Japanese militarists pointed to the remorselessly accelerating rise of a 
ubiquitous tide of Economic Nationalism, 1 and pressed upon their 
countrymen the alternative policy of military conquest with the argu¬ 
ments that the only markets that Japan could be sure of retaining in an 
ever more nationalist-minded world were markets under her own politi¬ 
cal control, and that even controlled markets would not solve Japan’s 
economic problem unless they were supplemented by controlled sources 
of food-supply and raw materials. The gradual effect of a world-wide 
accentuation of Nationalism in converting the Japanese people to the 
Japanese militarists’ doctrine was clinched by the terrible experience of 
the devastating economic blizzard which descended on Wall Street in 
the autumn of a.d. 1929 and then swept on over the rest of the World. 

When the Japanese militarists launched their campaign of aggression 
at Mukden on the night of the i8th-i9th September, 1931, they were 
condemning Mankind to the torment of a Second World War within 
eight years of this date, and condemning their own country, in particular, 
to the additional disaster of seeing that torment culminate within four¬ 
teen years in the national calamity of an utter military defeat. In the 
Second World War Japan was not only justly defeated in her desperate 
attempt to solve her latter-day economic problem by an unbridled 
career of military conquest; she was also justly deprived of all the con¬ 
quests at the expense of weaker peoples that she had made through an 
unscrupulous militarism since a.d. 1894. Yet this just and auspicious 
frustration of Japan’s unprincipled policy of trying to solve her economic 
problem by means of military aggression was a negative achievement 
which had prevented the consummation of a crime without alleviating the 
pressure that had moved the criminal to commit his wicked acts; and, at 
a date some six or seven years after ‘V-J. Day’, a positive solution of 
Japan’s economic problem seemed to be as far off as ever—though a 
Japanese student of history might perhaps find some hope and consola¬ 
tion in the strange new fact that, as an ironical consequence of the 
United States’ crushing victory, the responsibility for solving this in¬ 
sistent Japanese problem by some means or other had been transferred 
from Japanese to American shoulders. 

In Chinese history the latest illustration of a primitive peasantry’s 

1 The turn of the tide during the decade a.d. i 861-71—the very time when Japan waa 
making her belated entry into a Westernizing World—has been noticed in IV. iv. 174. 
The chief threat to Japan’s exports came, not from the Western industrial countries, 
but from the progressive industrialization of non-Westcm countries that, like India, 
were beginning to follow Japan’s example. 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE FAR EAST 333 
habitual tendency to breed up to the limits of subsistence had been 
manifested during the floruit of the Manchu regime from the closing 
decades of the seventeenth century to the opening decades of the nine¬ 
teenth. In the subsequent period of attempted Westernization the 
Chinese had never approached a level of military efficiency on Western 
lines at which they would have had it in their power to emulate Japan’s 
abortive attempt to carve out an empire for herself with the sword at the 
expense of her neighbours. The worst that, down to a.d. 1950, the 
Chinese had been able to achieve through an imperfect mastery of 
Western military apparatus had been to employ it for enhancing the 
lethal effect of civil war, which in China was the traditional remedy for 
an excessive increase in population; and, although the Chinese Com¬ 
munist armies that had been launched in a.d. 1950 against the Americans 
and their allies in a Korean arena had fought with an efficiency and a 
resoluteness which the West had never encountered before in Chinese 
troops, they had failed, notwithstanding their superiority in numbers 
and their supplies of Russian equipment, to drive their Western 
opponents out of South Korea. In a.d. 1952 it did not look as if China, 
even under a Communist regime, had much prospect of being more 
successful than Japan had been if she were to set out, as Japan had done, 
to conquer a I^bensraum for herself by force of arms. It was all the more 
fortunate for China that she had inherited from her latest semi-barbarian 
conquerors, the Manchus, the last substantial unoccupied reserve of 
land in the temperate zone of the Northern Hemisphere. 

Since the removal in a.d. 1878 1 of the last restrictions on Chinese 
immigration into the great open spaces of Manchuria beyond the 
Willow Palisade, with their vast resources in arable land, minerals, and 
timber, the Chinese population of 'the Three Eastern Provinces’ had 
risen to the figure of approximately forty million within three genera¬ 
tions; and this mass migration—which had changed the demographic 
map of the World as markedly as the Russian colonization of the Black 
Sea Steppes and Siberia or the West European colonization of the 
Americas and the South Seas—had been stimulated by the scourges of 
civil war, pestilence, and famine in the densely populated adjoining 
intramural Chinese provinces of Chihli, Shantung, and Hopei. In the 
alternating current of Chinese history, adversity had indeed been as 
potent a force as prosperity for promoting the constant expansion of the 

1 The establishment of the Manchu Empire in the se%’cntccnth century of the Christ¬ 
ian Era had brought the thinly populated steppes and forest-clad highlands of Man¬ 
churia under the same sovereignty as the densely Chinese-inhabited agricultural regions 
in the small area outside the Great Wall but inside the Willow Palisade and in the vast 
area inside the Great Wall, and under this dispensation there had been an unrestricted 
flow of Chinese immigration into the Manchurian country beyond the Willow Palisade. 
This immigration had been prohibited in a.d. 1776 by a decree of the Emperor Ch’icn 
Lunc with an eye to conserving the Manchurian reservoir of barbarian man-power 
which was the source of the Manchus’ military and political ascendancy in the Far 
Eastern World. This prohibition had proved ineffective, and, early in the reign of Tno 
Kuang (imperabat a.d. 1821-51), the Manchu Imperial Government had reversed Ch’ien 
Lung's policy- in Southern Manchuria by legalizing the sale of land in that area to 
Chinese purchasers. Heilungkiang, the northernmost and most extensive of the Man¬ 
churian provinces of the Manchu Empire, was officially opened to Chinese immigration 
in a.d. 1878, and Kirin a few years earlier (Young, C. W.: Chinese Colonisation and the 
Development of Manchuria (Honolulu 1929, Institute of Pacific Relations), pp. 8-10). 



334 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
Chinese people over an ever widening area; and this Chinese expansion, 
unlike its puny Japanese counterpart, was not restricted by any climatic 
limitations. While the Northern Chinese peasants had been schooled by 
the hard winters of their native provinces to lead a farmer’s life on the 
land in the rigorous climate of Manchuria, the Southern Chinese had 
been acclimatized by a fifteen-hundrcd-ycars-long sojourn in the sultry 
Yangtse Basin and on the sub-tropical shores of the China Sea for leading 
a business man’s life in the cities of Indo-China, Siam, Burma, Indonesia, 
and Malaya, where in the twentieth century of the Christian Era at least 
one new South-East Asian Chinese province could be seen taking shape 
through a traditional process of peaceful penetration. 

Yet, in spite of their opportunity and capacity for relieving the pres¬ 
sure of population in China by both the constructive expedient of urban 
and rural colonization in diverse physical climates, ranging from the 
tropical to the arctic, and the destructive expedient of chronic civil war, 
the Chinese mid-way through the twentieth century of the Christian 
Era were being defeated almost as signally as the Japanese by the prob¬ 
lem of coping with the fertility of a primitive peasantry’ in the social 
and psychological climate of a Westernizing World; and in China, un¬ 
like either Japan or India at this date, a problem which had so far found 
no solution on the lines of a Western-inspired Democracy was being 
forcibly taken in hand by a Russian-inspired Communism. In a.d. 1948-9 
a Kuomintang movement which had been discredited by the rapidity 
of its change of front from a revolutionary championship of reform to a 
reactionary defence of vested interests had been swept away by a Com¬ 
munism propagated by native Chinese Communist force of arms; and 
three years later, at the moment when this volume was being sent to the 
press, the Communist regime in China appeared to be securely in the 
saddle. 

A Communist Russia's Chinese Fifth Column 

It remained to be seen whether a Chinese peasantry whose disillusion¬ 
ment with the Kuomintang had been a decisive though imponderable 
factor in turning the scales would find an effective remedy for its ills in 
the Communist prescription or would relish the prescribed regimen 
even if it were to prove capable of producing its promised effect; but it 
was already clear that the military and ideological conquest of China by 
Communism in a.d. 1949 was the latest move in a Russian assault on the 
main body of the Far Eastern Society which by that date had been in 
progress for some three hundred years—though this was the first opera¬ 
tion in which the Russian strategists had commanded the services of 
a Chinese ‘fifth column’. 

In the second quarter of the seventeenth century of the Christian Era, 
when the Japanese were breaking off their tentative relations with an 
Early Modern Western Christendom and when Manchu empire-builders 
who had already passed the Willow' Palisade were preparing to make 
their passage through the Great Wall, the Manchus were taken in the 
rear by Cossack pioneers of an expanding Russian Orthodox Christen¬ 
dom who had burst into the Upper Basin of the Amur River after 



THE MODERN WEST AND THE FAR EAST 335 
successively outflanking DSr-al-Islam and the Eurasian Steppe. As soon 
as the Manchus had broken at least the overt resistance of Southern 
China, where their usurpation had been stubbornly contested, they 
turned upon these audacious Cossack trespassers on the Manchurian 
pasture-lands that were the reservoir of Manchu barbarian man-power, 
and drove the intruders back to a line which the Imperial Russian 
Government found itself compelled to accept de jure as the frontier 
between the two Powers and to respect de facto for a hundred and sixty- 
eight years following the conclusion, at Nerchinsk, of the Russo-Manchu 
peace treaty of a.d. 1689. 

This treaty provided for the maintenance of an authorized channel for 
overland trade between the two empires, and of a Russian embassy and 
church at Peking; but, throughout the next two centuries, the impact 
of Russia on China overland was felt only faintly by comparison with the 
maritime impact of the Portuguese and their more aggressive British and 
French successors. The concessions exacted from China by the maritime 
Western Powers as the victors’ spoils in the wars of a.d. 1839-42 and 
a.d. 1857-60 cut Chinese sensibilities to the quick; but, when, in a.d. 
1857, Russia righted the balance of competitive aggression at China’s 
expense by compelling the Manchu Imperial Government to cede to 
Russia their title to all the territory that the peace settlement of a.d. 
1689 had assigned to the Manchu Empire on the left bank of the Amur 
and the right bank of the Ussuri, neither the Chinese people nor even 
their Manchu masters were sensibly affected by the loss of these then 
still empty border territories; and they seem hardly to have noticed the 
construction of the new Russian port of Vladivostok in an all but ice- 
free natural harbour at the south-western extremity of these ceded 
Manchu territories, within a stone’s throw of the north-cast corner of 
Korea. The Chinese did not become apprehensively aware of Russia’s 
advancing shadow till a.d. 1897, when the Russian Navy occupied Port 
Arthur as Russia’s prize in a scramble between the Powers of the Western 
World for the seizure of naval bases on China’s coasts, and a.d. 1900, 
when, taking advantage of the imbroglio with the maritime Western 
Powers in which China had been involved by a ‘Zealot’ movement 
culminating in the xenophobe Boxer Rebellion, the Russian Army 
swooped upon Manchuria and planted itself—in the footprints of the 
Manchus on the eve of the Manchu conquest of Intramural China 
250 years back—at the threshold of Shanhaikwan, the vital passage 
between the mountains and the sea which was Intramural China’s 
Thermopylae. 

The sequel to this Russian seizure of Manchuria in a.d. 1897-1900, 
like the sequel to the preceding Japanese victory over China in a.d. 
1894-5, was to demonstrate the vanity of Militarism. It was in vain that 
the Russians sought to consolidate their territorial gains in the Far 
East, and to prepare the way for extending them farther, by pressing 
a new-fangled Western mechanical invention into the sendee of the 
archaic crime of military aggression. The Russian-built railway linking 
Vladivostok and Port Arthur with St. Petersburg notably surpassed 
the North American transcontinental railways in its length, and 


336 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

challenged comparison with them in the rapidity of its construction; 1 yet, 
in performing this feat, the Russian railway engineers were working 
unwittingly for the Japanese. The South Manchurian section of the 
Russian-built railway-system was transferred to Japanese hands in the 
peace-settlement following the defeat of Russia in the Russo-Japanese 
War of a.d. 1904-5; and, a generation later, Russia was compelled to 
advertise her then still unretrieved military inferiority to Japan in the 
Far Eastern zone of contact between the two Powers by agreeing to the 
forced sale to Japan, at a derisory price, of the trunk line of the Russian 
transcontinental railway within the frontiers of the newly conquered 
Japanese puppet state of ‘Manchukuo’. 2 When Japanese militarism, in 
its turn, met with its nemesis at American hands, Russia was enabled— 
as an incidental consequence of American prowess in naval warfare and 
in atomic physics—to take her revenge for forty-three years of humilia¬ 
tion 3 by rounding up the once redoubtable Japanese Kwantung Army 
in a lightning campaign of twenty-five days. 4 But there was no evidence 
that in a.d. 1945 Russia could have defeated Japan in Manchuria if she 
had had to depend solely on her own military strength; and, in the 
sequel, the sensational resumption of a Russian advance beyond the 
limits of Manchuria which had been checked in a.d. 1904-5 by Japanese 
arms was accomplished, without any direct Russian military action at 
all, through the operation of Russian ideas and ideals on Chinese minds 
and hearts. 

In spite of the establishment of a Russian Orthodox Christian mission 
at Peking since aj). 1689, Russian Orthodox Christianity had never 
gained in China any influence comparable to that of a Modern Western 
Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. So long as the competition 
between the West and Russia for the spiritual conquest of Chinese 
souls was conducted on a common Christian basis, the preponderance of 
the Western spiritual influence was overwhelming*. But the balance of 
impinging alien spiritual forces in the Chinese arena changed when the 
substitution of Liberalism for Christianity as the gospel of the West was 
followed by the substitution of Communism for Christianity as the 
gospel of Russia. Communism could plausibly claim to offer a more 
practically relevant remedy than Liberalism for the ills of a society that 

1 Except for the loop round the southern end of Lake Baikal, which was not built 
till a.d. 1905, the through-connexion linking Vladivostok and Port Arthur via Man¬ 
churia with the previous rail-head of the Russian railway-system at Chelyabinsk in 
Western Siberia was achieved within the deccnnium A.D. 1892-1902. 

1 The sale was finally transacted on the 23rd March, 1935, a ^ ter negotiations that it 
had taken the best part of a year to carry through to completion. 

’ The writer of this Study realized how extreme this Russian humiliation was when, 
on the 24th November, 1929, in the course of a visit to Port Arthur under Japanese rule, 
he was taken by his Japanese cicerone to see the Japanese officers’ club there. This had 
been the Russian officers’ club before the fall of Port Arthur on the 2nd January, 1905, 
and, as a memorial of their victory, the Japanese inheritors of the establishment had 
kept all the Russian appointments exactly as they had found them. One feature that 
vividly impressed itself on the writer’s memory was a room decorated with a series of 
coloured prints depicting Russian victories in the Russo-Turkish War of a.d. 1877-8. 
In A.D. 1929 the Japanese occupants of the building manifestly relished the irony of this 
display, and, no doubt, in a . d . 1945 the Russians equally savoured the pleasure of taking 
their club over again from interloping tenants who hud not dreamed that their conscien¬ 
tious care-taking was to be, after all, for the benefit of the original owners. 

* 9th August to 2nd September, 1945. 



THE MODERN WEST AND ITS CONTEMPORARIES 337 
was being worsted by the problem of a peasantry whose expectations had 
been heightened while its habits remained unchanged; and by a.d. 1952 
the programme of the Chinese Communist leaders had not yet been 
discredited by a discrepancy between profession and practice which had 
already destroyed the credit of the Kuomintang. 

Thus in China, as in other living non-Western societies, the middle 
years of the twentieth century of the Christian Era witnessed the deliver}' 
of a Russian challenge to the influence of a Modern Western Civilization 
which had appeared to have the whole World at its feet before the out¬ 
break of the First World War in a.d. 1914. 

7. Characteristics of the Encounters between the Modern West and its 
Contemporaries up to date 

We have now surveyed at least the principal examples of encounters 
with the Modern Western Civilization up to the points at which these 
still continuing dramas had arrived by the time of writing, and, in the 
process, we have also taken note of a number of encounters, since the 
turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of the Christian Era, between 
living non-Western civilizations. Neither of these fields has been covered 
in our survey completely. There are encounters which involved the 
Modern West, and contemporary encounters to which the Modern 
West was not a party, that have not been included in our review. 1 Yet 

1 In the field of encounters to which the Modem West was a party, we have cited 
the Zoroastrian diaspori in India as an historical counterpart of the Jewish diaspoii in 
the West without entering into the history of the relations between the Parsees and the 
Modem Western World since the establishment of direct intercourse between the West 
and India in a.d. 1498; and we have not taken any account of the Modem Western 
World's relations with the surviving Nestorian, Monophysite, and ex-Monothelete 
Christian fossils of an extinct Syriac Society, which, like the Zoroastrian and Jewish 
fossils deposited in a previous chapter of history, were products of a long-continuing 
collision and conflict between the Syriac Civilization and Hellenism. By the middle of 
the twentieth century the Nestorian Assyrians of ‘Ir 5 q, the Zagros, and Malabar, the 
Monophysite Gregorian Armenians, Jacobite Syrians, and Coptic Egyptians and Abys- 
sinians, and the ex-Monothelete Maronites of the Lebanon, had all yielded to the impact 
of the Modem Western Civilization in some degree. Every one of these fossil Oriental 
churches had lost converts to Tridentinc Roman Catholic and to Protestant Western 
Christianity (though the seventeenth-century Malabari Nestorian converts to Roman 
Catholicism had transferred their allegiance, in the third Quarter of the seventeenth 
century, to the Monophysite Patriarch of Antioch); and in ail of them likewise the un¬ 
converted majorities had come under the influence of a secularized Modern Western 
culture. The same secular Modem Western influence had also made itself felt on the 
Hinayanian Buddhist relics of an extinct Indie culture in Ceylon, Burma, Siam, and 
Cambodia, and in Ceylon there had been conversions from Hinayanian Buddhism to both 
Roman Catholic and Protestant Western Christianity. 

In the economic unification of the World on a Modern Western basis by Modem 
Western enterprise the economic resources of insular and continental South-East Asia 
—beginning with spices and passing on to rice, rubber, tin, teak, coffee, and quinine— 
had come to play an outstandingly important part, and the opportunities thus opened up 
under Western auspices had drawn into South-East Asia an inflow of Chinese and 
Hindu and Hadhramawti Arab business men and industrial workers. By the time of 
writing, the Hinayanian Buddhist populations of the South-East Asian mainland and 
the Sunni Muslim and Protestant and Roman Catholic Christian populations of the 
Malayan Peninsula, Sumatra, Java, Celebes, and the Philippines were feeling this con¬ 
vergent pressure from the giant societies on either side of them, and an historian could 
foresee a resolution of this multiple interplay of cultural forces into the simpler but more 
formidable issue of the locus of the future line of demarcation between a Chinese and a 
Hindu Society in a South-East Asia where the indigenous populations would have been 
submerged after the elimination of their ephemeral Western masters or protectors. 

There had been other encounters since the close of the fifteenth century between 



338 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
the evidence that we have examined in the preceding chapters is perhaps 
sufficient to allow us to draw some general conclusions from it. 

The most significant of the conclusions that suggest themselves is that 
the word ‘modern’ in the term 'Modern Western Civilization’ can, with¬ 
out inaccuracy, be given a more precise and concrete connotation by being 
translated ‘middle-class’. Western communities became ‘modern’, in 
the accepted Modern Western meaning of the word, just as soon as they 
had succeeded in producing a bourgeoisie that was both numerous enough 
and competent enough to become the predominant element in Society. 1 
We think of the new chapter of Western history that opened at the turn 
of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as being ‘modern’ par excellence 
because, for the next four centuries and more, until the opening of a 
‘post-Modcrn Age’ at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 
the middle class was in the saddle in the larger and more prominent part 
of the Western World as a whole. Yet, throughout this so-called ‘Modern 
Age’, there were fringes of the Western World—in Eastern Europe, 
Southern Italy, the Iberian Peninsula, and Latin America—that had 
never completely ceased to be ‘medieval’ in terms of this qualitative and 
not merely chronological test, while conversely, by the same test, the 
abortive city-state cosmos in Central and Northern Italy, Western 
Germany, the Low Countries, and the Hansa Towns was already 
‘modern’ in the Later Middle Ages. 

This definition of the Modern Western culture as being a phase of 
Western cultural development that is distinguished by the ascendancy 
of the middle class throws light on the conditions under which, before 
the advent in the West of a post-Modcrn Age marked by the rise of an 
industrial urban working class, any alien recipients of this Modern 
Western culture would be likely to be successful in making it their own. 
During the currency of the Modem Age of Western history the ability of 
aliens to become Westerners would be proportionate to their capacity 
for entering into the middle-class Western way of life. 

This tentative conclusion is manifestly borne out by the facts when 
wc test it by reference to cases of Westernization from below upwards. 
In the indigenous social structure of Greek Orthodox Christian, Chinese, 
and Japanese life, for example, there were elements that had some 
affinity with the middle-class clement in the impinging Western Society; 
and the Westernization of the Greeks and the Chinese was undoubtedly 
facilitated, governed, and limited by the pace and extent of their progress 


living non-Western civilizations to which the Modem West had not been a patty even 
temporarily or indirectly. While the impact of the Modern West had affected the rela¬ 
tions of the ex-Monothelete, Monophysite, and Nestorian Christian subjects of the Otto¬ 
man Empire with their Muslim neighbours, and the relations of the Parsecs and ’Saint 
Thomas’s Christians’ in India with their Hindu neighbours, there had been no Western 
intervention in the sixteenth-centuiy competition between Sunni Islam and the Tantric 
Mahayanian Buddhism of Tibet for the conversion of still pagan Nomads on the 
Eurasian Steppe, none in the eighteenth-century collision between the Lamas' Calmuck 
converts and the Chinese main body of the Far Eastern Society, and none in the nine¬ 
teenth-century collision between this indigenous Far Eastern culture and the Far East¬ 
ern outposts of the Islamic World in the Tarim Basin, the North-Western Chinese 
provinces of Kansu and Shensi, and the South-Western Chinese province of Yunnan. 

* i.e. to become the iroXirfvua, as this predominant element was conveniently desig¬ 
nated in the technical terminology of Hellenic political science (sec VI. vii. 373, n. 1). 



THE MODERN WEST AND ITS CONTEMPORARIES 3 39 

in developing these existing rudiments into a full-blown middle class in 
the Modem Western sense.' In these two Westernizing movements from 
below upwards the progress was gradual and was frequently checked by 
set-backs, but, as far as it went, it did result in the formation of a genuine 
middle class in these originally non-Western social milieux. On the 
other hand in cases in which the process of Westernization proceeded 
from above downwards—and Japan, as we have seen, 2 changed over to 
this alternative approach after the Meiji Revolution—the autocrats who 
set themselves to Westernize their subjects by fiat did not think of wait¬ 
ing for an unforced process of social evolution to provide them with 
authentic middle-class agents of indigenous origin for the execution of 
their Westernizing policy; and, since it was manifestly impracticable 
even for the most energetic autocrat to carry out a Westernizing policy 
single-handed, and even for autocrats who were Western conquerors of 
a non-Wcstern society to propagate their alien way of life solely through 
the agency of Western-born administrators and missionaries without 
enlisting the aid of native converts, the high-handed apostles of Western¬ 
ization from above downwards were constrained in every case to provide 
themselves with an artificial substitute for a home-grown middle class by 
manufacturing an intelligentsia. 

The intelligentsias 3 thus called into existence in Russia, the Islamic 
and Hindu worlds, and Japan in response to the ubiquitous challenge of 
the impact of the Modern West were, of course, successfully imbued by 
their makers with a genuine tincture of middle-class qualities—as was 
demonstrated by their partial success in inducting into a middle-class 
Modern Western way of life the non-Western societies from which they 
had been recruited. The Russian case suggests, however, that even this 
partial success might be only provisional and ephemeral. In Russia, as we 
have seen, 4 Peter the Great’s policy of adopting the Modern Western 
way of life in its orthodox middle-class form had been violently repu¬ 
diated 228 years after Peter’s effective advent to power in a.d. 1689. It 
had been supplanted in a.d. 1917 by the alternative policy of pressing 
forward with the acquisition and application of a Modem Western 
technology as an instrument for combating the orthodox middle-class 
Western ideology of Liberalism in the name of the heretical anti¬ 
bourgeois Western ideology of Marxism. This Marxian heresy had be¬ 
come the creed of a Russian intelligentsia which had originally been 
called into existence by the Petrine Tsardom to carry out the mission of 
bringing Russia into the middle-class Western fold; and, for at least 
three generations before the explosion on the political surface of life in 
the second Russian revolution of a.d. 1917, an anti-bourgeois animus 
in the hearts of a nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia had been 
finding a literary vent in the works of Russian writers. 5 The wider 
significance of this chapter of Russian history lay in the fact that the 


* In Japan, however, the commercial and industrial leaders of the Meiji Era were 
recruited, not from the commercial class of the Tokugaw* Era, but from the Samurai, 
according to Sansom, G. B.: Japan. A Short Cultural History (London 1932, Cresset 
Press), p. 501. 

1 On pp. 327-8, above. J See V. v. 154-9* 

« On pp. 133-6, above. * See, for example, pp. 699-701, below. 



34 ° ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
movement for Westernization from above downwards had been started 
in Russia a hundred years earlier than in the Islamic, Hindu, and 
Japanese worlds; for this chronological datum suggested that the latest 
turn of events in Russia might be an augury of one of the possibilities 
that were lying in wait for those other non-Western worlds in chapters of 
their histories that were still in the future at a date mid-way through the 
twentieth century. The possibility that these other histories in their 
turn might eventually take a Russian course was, indeed, something 
more than a mere theoretical induction from the Russian historical 
precedent. It was also implicit in an affinity between the Far Eastern, 
Hindu, and Islamic intelligentsias and the Russian intelligentsia that 
was already a matter of observable fact. 

In the light of this anti-bourgeois turn which the Russian intelligentsia 
had already taken and towards which the other intelligentsias might be 
tending, it is perhaps worth pausing to look into the likenesses and the 
differences between the non-Western intelligentsias and the Western 
middle class whose role they had been commissioned to play in a non- 
Western social environment. 

One important common characteristic of the Western middle class and 
the latter-day non-Westcrn intelligentsias was their common provenance 
from beyond the original pale of the societies in which they had succeeded 
eventually in establishing themselves. In studying the encounter between 
the Western Society and the Jewish diaspora in its midst, 1 we have 
observed that the Western Society when it first emerged in the Dark 
Ages, like the surviving non-Western societies when they first collided 
with the West in its modem phase, was an agrarian society in whose life 
the urban pursuits of industry, commerce, and finance were exotic and 
were originally practised—in so far as they were practised at all—by an 
alien Jewish diaspork, until a Gentile Western middle class was called 
into being by the Western Gentiles’ aspiration to be their own Jews. The 
abiding affinity of the Western middle class with a diaspora of the type 
represented by Western Jewry—a community uprooted from the soil 
and addicted to peculiarly urban occupations—was demonstrated, long 
after the Gentile Western middle class had captured from the country¬ 
folk the key position of being the dominant element in Society, by the 
alacrity and ease with which the Armenian Gregorian and Greek Ortho¬ 
dox Christian diasporas in the Ottoman World, and the Parsec diaspork 
in India, acclimatized themselves to the way of life of a Modem Western 
middle-class society. Conversely the Parsec or Armenian or Greek 
Westernized business man who came to work in New York or London 
and to sleep in Connecticut or Sussex appeared hardly more alien in the 
local farmer’s eyes than the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ business man who shuttled 
to and fro in the same suburban trains between the same dormitories and 
offices. In a twentieth-century American or English farmer’s sight, all 
his urban middle-class contemporaries—the W'csternized and the native 
Western alike—were still as exotic as a Cordovan or Tarragonese Jew 
had once been in the eyes of a sixth-century peasant in Visigothia. 

This quaintly invidious appearance of being ‘pariahs in power’ in the 
1 On pp. 276 and 284-6, above. 



THE MODERN WEST AND ITS CONTEMPORARIES 341 
eyes of unuprooted cultivators of the soil was not the only point of like¬ 
ness between the Modern Western middle class and the contemporary 
intelligentsias. Another point in common between them was that both 
had won their eventual dominance by revolting against their original 
employers. In Holland, Great Britain, the United States, France, and 
other Western countries the middle class had successively come into 
power by stepping into the shoes of enlightened monarchies whose 
patronage had inadvertently made the middle class’s fortune. In non- 
Western polities in the Late Modern Age of Western history the intelli¬ 
gentsia had likewise come into power by successfully revolting against 
Westernizing autocrats who had been, not the inadvertent makers of 
their fortunes, but the deliberate authors of their existence. 1 

These points of likeness between intelligentsias called into existence 
in non-Western societies by Westernizing autocrats and a Western 
middle class whose role these intelligentsias were called upon to play 
are offset by at least one signal difference. The middle class that made 
itself paramount in the Western World in the Modern Age of Western 
history was an indigenous element in the society that it eventually came 
to dominate, in spite of its having had no place in that society’s original 
social order. The history of the gradual and arduous ascent of this 
Western middle class from the lowly outskirts of the Western social 
hierarchy to its centre and summit was the history of the Western 

1 If we take a synoptic view of this common episode in the histories of Petrine Russia, 
a latter-day Ottoman Empire, and the British Raj in India, we shall see that the revolt 
of the intelligentsia not only occurred in all three cases but came to a head in each case 
after the lapse of approximately the same span of time, reckoning from the initial dates 
of the respective Westernizing movements. In Russia the abortive Decembrist Revolu¬ 
tion of a.d. 182s. which was the Russian intelligentsia’s declaration of war on the Petrine 
Tsardom, broke out rt6 years after Peter’s effective advent to power in A.D. 1689. In 
India political 'unrest' began to reveal itself in Bengal towards the close of the nineteenth 
century, rather less than 140 years after the British occupation of Bengal in A.D. 1757 ” 
60. In the Ottoman Empire the Committee of Union and Progress overthrew Sultan 
‘Abd-al-Hamid II in a.d. 1908, 134 years after the Porte had first been impelled, by 
the shock of defeat in the Great Russo-Turkish War of A.D. 1768-74, to begin training 
its Muslim subjects in appreciable numbers in a Modem Western art of war which had 
so signally demonstrated its efficacy at the Turk*’ expense when it had been employed 
against them even by Russian novices in the use of Western technology. 

At this point we need not take up the question, raised in XI. ix. 187, below, whether 
the remarkable uniformity in the length of the time that it took for the revolt of the in¬ 
telligentsia to come to a head in these three cases was a fortuitous coincidence or was the 
uniform effect of the operation of some constant psychological 'law'. We will merely 
note, in passing, that the argument in favour of the second of these two alternative 
possible explanations is supported by the reappearance of the same Time-span in a fourth 
case which, if not exactly parallel, "is at least analogous. There was an interval of 138 
years between the ‘Osmanlis’ defeat before the Walls of Vienna in A.D. 1683, which 
moved them to continue and extend the experiment of employing Phanariot Greek 
Orthodox Christian subjects of the Porte in responsible positions in the Ottoman public 
service, and the Greek uprising of a.d. 1821, which took place partly under Phanariot 
leadership. The parallel is not exact, because the Phanariots were not an intelligentsia 
which the Porte had called into existence; they were an embryonic Greek counterpart of 
the contemporary Western middle class who had made their fortunes by their own 
private enterprise and, in the process, had already acquired a familiarity with the West 
and its ways which opened a door for their entry into the Ottoman public service as soon 
as the Porte found itself obliged to negotiate with Western Powers to whom it was no 
longer strong enough to dictate. In these circumstances, Phanariots had already been 
appointed to key posts in the Ottoman sendee in the generation preceding the Ottoman 
catastrophe of A.D. 1683. The * 3 $ >’ ears running from A.D. 1683 to 1821 were, however, 
those during which the Porte was so dependent on its Phanariot servants’ knowledge 
of the Western World that the period may be described as a distinctively Phanariot 
Age of Ottoman administrative history. 



342 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
Society’s own spontaneous self-development. By contrast, the artificially 
manufactured intelligentsias suffered from the double handicap of being 
both novi homines and exotics. They would never even have come into 
existence, and would certainly never have come into power, if the non- 
Western societies on to whose stems they were grafted had not collided 
with a Modern Western World that was so far superior to these other 
societies in potency that they found themselves confronted with a 
choice between Westernizing and going under. The non-Western intelli¬ 
gentsias, unlike the Western middle class, were products and symptoms 
of their societies' discomfiture in encounters with a Western World 
which had been raised, by the rise of an indigenous middle class, to a 
height of prosperity and power at which it was more than a match for 
all its contemporaries. In short, the Western middle class stood for 
strength, whereas the Westernizing intelligentsias spelled weakness. 

The intelligentsias, for their part, were sensitively aware of this in¬ 
vidious difference between themselves and the Western middle class; 
for the task of coping with this aggressive adversary was the intelli¬ 
gentsias’ raison d’Stre, and they were condemned to spend themselves in 
this distressingly unequal contest on behalf of members of their own 
household from whom they had inevitably been alienated in the act of 
being trained to perform a social service that was as exotic from the 
standpoint of their native cultural tradition as it was vital in a world over 
which the West had cast its shadow. Their intuition of the thanklessness 
of their task conspired with an unavowed but inexorable nervous 
strain arising from the inherent contradictions in their social situation to 
breed in the intelligentsias a smouldering hatred of a Western middle 
class which was both their sire and their banc, their cynosure and their 
bugbear; and their excruciatingly ambivalent attitude towards this pirate 
sun, whose captivated planets they were, is poignantly conveyed in 
Catullus’s elegiac couplet: 

Odi ct amo: quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. 
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior . 1 

These two lines of Latin poetry enunciated the inexhaustible theme of a 
nineteenth-century Westernizing Russian literature whose masterpieces 
ran to many volumes; and this testament of a Russian intelligentsia that 
had been able to relieve its own malaise by the masterly exercise of a 
singular gift for self-expression faithfully mirrored the experience of 
other intelligentsias, sentenced to the same Psyche’s task, whose un¬ 
uttered woes might have been ignored if they had not found Russian 
spokesmen. 

The intensity of an alien intelligentsia’s hatred of the Western middle 
class gave the measure of that intelligentsia’s foreboding of its own in¬ 
ability to emulate Western middle-class achievements. The classic in¬ 
stance, up to date, in which this embittering prescience had been justified 
by the event was the Russian intelligentsia’s catastrophic failure, after 
the first of the two Russian revolutions in a.d. 1917, to carryout its 
fantastic mandate to transform the wreck of the Petrine Tsardom into a 
1 Catullus, Q.V.: Carmina, No. lxxxv. 



THE MODERN WEST AND ITS CONTEMPORARIES 3 43 
parliamentary constitutional state in the nineteenth-century Western 
style. The Kerensky regime was a fiasco because it was saddled with the 
impracticable task of making bricks without straw. The Modern Western 
political system of responsible parliamentary government had been the 
creation of a middle class which had been sufficiently competent, experi¬ 
enced, prosperous, and numerous to come into political power when the 
time was ripe for it. In the social structure of the Russia of a . d . 1917 there 
was no corresponding element, and the Petrine Russian intelligentsia’s 
inability to take a robust Western middle class’s massive responsibilities 
on its own lean shoulders was demonstrated by its speedy collapse under 
the crushing weight of this unnatural burden. In this classic Russian 
instance, however, in which the action had been carried farther, mid¬ 
way through the twentieth century of the Christian Era, than in the 
history of any other encounter with the Modern West, the sequel had 
been no less quick in showing that an intelligentsia’s failure to emulate 
the peculiar political achievement of the Western middle class was no 
evidence of inability' to build any political structure of any kind. In 
Russia the same year a . d . 1917 that witnessed Kerensky’s swift failure 
also witnessed Lenin’s enduring success. 

In Russia, before the year a.d. 1917 ran out, Lenin founded a polity 
of an original type which, in contrast to Kerensky’s abortive essay in 
a conventional Western parliamentary rdgime, was constructed, not in 
obedience to a priori theory, but with a practical eye for dealing with an 
actual situation. As we have noticed in another context, 1 Lenin’s objec¬ 
tive was to repeat, and thereby salvage, Peter the Great's achievement 
of saving Russia from succumbing to the aggression of a technologically 
superior Western World by driving the Russian people to catch up with 
the vanguard of contemporary’ Western technological progress. Lenin 
faced the hard fact that this painful forced march could be exacted from 
an already exhausted people only by the discipline of the drill-sergeant’s 
rod; and the particular form of dictatorial regime that he devised for his 
particular purpose took account of the momentary social exigencies of 
a Modern Western technology in its twentieth-century phase, besides 
conforming to a more general and enduring historical ‘law’ which de¬ 
creed that the material gains of a revolutionary advance must always be 
paid for by losses of corresponding magnitude in the currency of liberty. 

Lenin’s political device for engineering a revolutionary Russian 
advance on a twentieth-century Western technological front was a per¬ 
sonal dictatorship underpinned by the unanimous support of a unique 
political party that was to merit and retain its monopoly of power by the 
discrimination with which it selected its recruits, the fanaticism with 
which it indoctrinated its novices, and the discipline which it imposed 
on its full-fledged members. In its embodiment of this idea and these 
ideals, Lenin’s All-Union Communist Party was not, of course, entirely 
without precedent. In Iranic Muslim history it had been anticipated 
in the Slave-Household of the Ottoman Padishah, 1 in the Qyzylbash 
fraternity of devotees of the Safawis, 1 and in a Sikh KhSlsa that had been 

« On pp. 139-41, above. 1 Sec III. iii. 31-47- 

s See I. i. 366-8 and V. v. 661-5. 



344 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
called into being in a subjugated Hindu World by a decision to fight a 
Mughal ascendancy with its own weapons. 1 In these older Hindu and 
Islamic fraternities the ethos of the Russian heresiarch’s Communist 
Party is already unmistakably discernible. Lenin’s claim to originality 
rests on his independence in reinventing this formidable political instru¬ 
ment for himself and on his priority in applying it to the special purpose 
of enabling a non-Westem society to hold its own against the Modern 
West by mastering the latest devices of a Modern Western technology 
without embracing the ideology that was the current Modern Western 
norm of orthodoxy. 

The effectiveness with which this purpose was served by the Leninian 
single-party type of dictatorial regime was indicated by the frequency 
with which it was consciously imitated or inadvertently reproduced in 
the contemporary political history of other non-Westcrn societies that 
were traditionally hostile to Russia but found themselves in the same 
predicament in a world in which ‘the Western Question’ had come to be 
ubiquitous. 

In the Kuomintang regime established at Canton by Sun Yat-sen in 
a.d. 1921 a tincture of Russian Communism was deliberately introduced 
by the Chinese philosopher-statesman in a.d. 1923 ; z and, in the subse¬ 
quent history of the Kuomintang National Government of China, the 
Leninian form of political constitution—a personal dictatorship sup¬ 
ported by a unique party—significantly survived the breach which 
opened in a.d. 1927 between the Kuomintang and a Chinese Communist 
Party which had sought to take advantage of its affiliation to the Kuo¬ 
mintang in order to gain control of the National Government from 
within. 3 Though the Chinese Communists’ rival pretensions were based 
on a claim to be genuine exponents of a Leninism which was admit¬ 
tedly diluted with Liberalism in the Kuomintang’s ideology, the Kuo¬ 
mintang did not demonstrate the sincerity of its unfeigned eagerness 
to dissociate itself from Communism by repudiating the Leninian 
element in its own constitution and doctrine. The exigencies of a com¬ 
mon predicament constrained a now bitterly anti-Russian Chinese 
ex-revolutionary party to continue to handle ‘the Western Question’ 
according to the inevitable Russian political prescription. From a.d. 1927 
to a.d. 1949, when the Chinese Communists swept the Kuomintang off 
the Chinese political chess-board, the pious assurance in the Kuomin¬ 
tang’s creed that ‘the period of tutelage’, which was the second of the 
three stages of revolution prescribed by Sun Yat-sen, was to be followed 
in due course by an unrestrictedly democratic dispensation was still just 

• See V. v. 665-8. 

1 On returning to Canton in the summer of a.d. 1923 after a temporary loss of his 
foothold there in a.d. 1922, Sun Yat-sen brought with him as his political adviser 
a representative of the Soviet Government at Moscow, Michael Borodin (see Survey 
of International Affairs, 1925, vol. ii (London 1928, Milford), p. 311). The members 
of the Chinese Communist Party, which had been formed circa a.d. 1920 (see Survey of 
International Affairs, 1926 (London J92S, Milford), p. 240, n. x), were admitted to 
membership in the Kuomintang at the beginning of a.d. 1924 (see Survey of International 
Affairs, 1927 (London 1929. Milford), p. 333). 

3 The Chinese Communist Party fell foul of the right wing of the Kuomintang at 
Nanchang in March 1927 and of the left wing of the Kuomintang at Hankow in June 
1927 (see Survey of International Affairs, 1927 (London 1929, Milford), pp. 331-65). 



THE MODERN WEST AND ITS CONTEMPORARIES 3 4 S 
as far from fulfilment 1 as the even more pious assurance in the Russian 
Marxist book of revelation that ‘the dictatorship of the proletariat’ was 
to fade out at long last through a withering away of the state itself. 

The adoption of the Leninian type of polity in China was not so remark¬ 
able, however, as its adoption in Turkey; for, by the time when, on the 
morrow of the First World War, Mustafa Kcmal Atatiirk established his 
revolutionary dictatorship more Rustico, Russia had been Turkey’s 
traditional ‘Enemy Number One’ for 150 years past, and a Russian 
provenance would have been enough in itself to discredit any idea or 
institution in Turkish eyes if this strong initial prejudice had not been 
overridden by some ineluctable necessity. The reason why patriotic- 
minded Turks were willing to take a lesson from Russia in this case was 
that their chastening experience of defeat in the First World War at the 
hands of technologically superior Western Powers had made the Turks, 
like the Russians, acutely aware that they must put themselves through 
a Westernizing technological revolution if they wished to survive; and 
the Turks, like the Russians, perceived that they could not carry out this 
revolutionary social manoeuvre unless they fell into the Leninian politi¬ 
cal formation of a comitatus at the heels of a dictator. Turkey’s happy 
issue out of an urgently necessary revolution that had been accomplished 
at this temporary cost was declared w’hen, on the 14th May, 1950, a party 
which by that date had been monopolizing political power in the 
country for twenty-seven years peacefully gave way to an opposition 
party by which it had been defeated in a genuinely free parliamentary 
general election. 

Both the 'lurks and the Chinese could go to school in a Russian 
political academy without ‘loss of face’, since, like the Russians, they 
were heirs of non-Western cultures at bay against the Modern West, 
while, in their grim common race against Time to find a solution for an 
ubiquitous ‘Western Question’, it was manifest that the Russians were 
considerably ahead of all their fellow runners. A more impressive tribute 
(though it was a left-handed compliment) was paid to the Russian 
intelligentsia’s political genius during the inter-war years in a mimesis 
of the Leninian polity in two great Western countries—Italy and 
Germany—where the local representatives of the Western middle class 
had failed to display the political ability of their brethren on the Atlantic 
seaboard without being their inferiors in an aptitude for technology 
that was the distinctive characteristic of Modern Western Man. 

In Germany and Italy the Fascist and National Socialist imitations of 
the Communist Russian totalitarian state had run headlong into disaster 
within the lifetimes of their makers. In China a Kuomintang regime— 
in which a Leninian combine of dictator and comitatus had been in¬ 
congruously overlaid with an appliqu6-work of Western liberal political 
motifs—had been ousted in a.d. 1949 by a Communist regime which 
claimed to be a faithful Chinese copy of an original Russian new model. 
In Russia this original Leninian polity had survived the tremendous 

> See, for example, the passage of the Government Organization Law, promulgated 
at Nanking on the 3rd October, 1928, which is quoted in Survey 0]International Affairs, 
1928 (London 1929, Milford), p. 389. 



346 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
ordeal of a Second World War to emerge as a rallying-point for all 
the forces still in the field against the ascendancy of the West over the 
World, and as the mighty antagonist of the United States if a devastating 
twentieth-century competition for world power were ever to be carried 
into a fatal final round. In Turkey, in contrast to Italy and Germany, a 
dictator who had introduced the Leninian polity there as a Russian 
means to a non-Communist end had died in his bed and had transmitted 
his dictatorship to a less demonic successor; and this successor and his 
partisans had afterwards demonstrated the sincerity of their conversion 
to the parliamentary democratic political ideals of the West by relinquish¬ 
ing office in obedience to the verdict of a parliamentary election in which 
they had not misused their power in order to ‘rig’ the results in their own 
favour, contrary to the will of the electorate. 

This bewildering diversity of the mid-twentieth-century political 
landscape in non-Westcm or ex-Western provinces of a West-ridden 
World was one of many indications that the drama of the Modern West’s 
encounter with the other living civilizations was then still in an early 
act even on the political plane of action, and a fortiori far from its denoue¬ 
ment at deeper levels; and this conclusion would suggest that our survey 
of encounters with the Modern Western Civilization up to date had 
yielded all the illumination that it was capable of yielding at the time of 
writing. If a twentieth-century observer was to carry his study of en¬ 
counters between civilizations farther, he must turn away from the 
spectacle of an uncompleted drama, in which the Modern Western 
Civilization was the protagonist, to consider the histories of other en¬ 
counters in which the whole story lay within his ken because the play 
had here already been played out to a finish. 

(b) ENCOUNTERS WITH MEDIEVAL WESTERN CHRISTENDOM 

r. The Flow and Ebb of the Crusades 1 

Ex hypothesi the whole story of the encounters between a Medieval 
Western Christendom and its neighbours was known to the writer of 
this Study and his contemporaries, since this story must have come 
to an end before the beginning of the subsequent story in w r hich 
a Modern Western Society was the principal character. These two 
successive stories of encounters in which the Western Civilization was 
involved had at least one feature in common: in both episodes the 
Westerners had been the aggressors. In these two successive outbreaks, 
however, the Western aggressors had followed different paths with 
different consequences. In their modern outbreak, as we have seen, they 
had taken ship from the Atlantic seaboard of Western Europe and had 
found their way over the Ocean to all quarters of the globe; in their 
medieval outbreak—for which a convenient short title was 'the Crusades’ 
in the broadest usage of the word 2 —they had taken ship from the 
Mediterranean seaboard of Western Europe for the Levant, or ridden 
out across the open eastern land-frontier of their Western Christian 


1 See xi, map. 41. 


* Sec I. i. 38 and V. v. 242-4. 



ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 3 47 

World into the adjoining domains of Orthodox Christendom in South- 
East Europe and in Russia. In conquering the World through mastering 
the Ocean, the Modern Westerners had been pioneers in an oecumenical 
adventure of which the issue was still hidden in the future mid-way 
through the twentieth century of the Christian Era. On the other hand 
in invading Dar-al-Isl 5 m and Orthodox Christendom the Medieval 
Western Christians had been treading in the Hellenic footprints of 
Alexander the Great and Titus Quinctius Flamininus on well-worn 
tracks that had led them to the source of their religion at Jerusalem and 
the source of their secular culture at Athens. 1 

The medieval outbreak of the Western Society in the eleventh century 
of the Christian Era was as surprisingly abrupt as its modern outbreak 
at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and the eventual 
collapse of the medieval Western adventure came as swiftly as its initial 
success. An intelligent observer from India, China, or Japan who had 
made his way to the other end of the Old World in the fifth or sixth 
decade of the thirteenth century of the Christian Era would have been 
as unlikely to foresee that the Western intruders were on the verge of 
being expelled from both ‘Dar-al-Islam’ 1 and ‘Romania’ 3 as he would 
have been—had he arrived on the scene three hundred years earlier—to 
foresee that these same two worlds were at that date on the verge of being 
attacked and overrun by the hitherto apparently backward and ineffective 
natives of the far western extremity of the cultivated visitor’s Oikoumcni. 

As soon as he had learnt to distinguish the two Hellenistic Christian 
societies from a Hellenising Syriac Society 4 which was in process of 
conversion from the Monophysite and Nestorian Christian heresies and 
Zoroastrianism to the all but Christian heresy of Islam, 5 our imaginary 
tenth-century Far Eastern observer would probably have come to the 
conclusion that, of these three local competitors for the command of 
the Mediterranean Sea and its hinterlands, Orthodox Christendom had 
the best prospects and Western Christendom the worst. 

On the divers tests of the competing societies’ comparative standing 
in wealth, education, administrative efficiency, and success in war, 
Orthodox Christendom would assuredly have come out at the top of our 
mid-tcnth-ccntury observer’s list, and Western Christendom at the 
bottom. Western Christendom in that generation was an agrarian society 
in which urban life was exotic 6 and coin a rare currency, whereas in 
contemporary Orthodox Christendom there was a money economy 
based on an efficient and prosperous commerce and industry-. 7 In 
Western Christendom the clergy alone was literate, whereas in Orthodox 
Christendom there was a lay governing class that was not merely literate 
but was educated in the high culture of an extinct Hellenic Society to 
which both the Christendoms were affiliated. 8 On the political plane, 

1 Sec I. i. 19 and X. ix. 100-1. 1 The derelict domain of the Caliphate. 

> The derelict domain of the East Roman Empire. 

♦ See p. 408, with n. 5, below. 

s For this Christian aspect of Islam, see the quotation from N&ldeke and Schwally 
in V. v. 230, n. 4. For the replacement of Monophysite and Nestorian Christianity by 
Islam in the Syriac World, sec xi, maps 38 and 39. 

6 See pp. 276 and 284-6, above. 

* See IV. iv. 344. 


* See IV.iv. 345-6- 


348 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
Western Christendom was living in a state of anarchy into which it had 
been plunged by the speedy failure of the semi-barbarian war-lord 
Charlemagne’s over-ambitious attempt to erect a replica of the Roman 
Empire on this unpropitious terrain, whereas in Orthodox Christendom 
the revival of the Roman Empire by Leo Syrus, two generations before 
Charlemagne’s day, had proved itself a success by a record—now more 
than two hundred years long—of survival, consolidation, and expansion. 1 * 
During the second quarter of the tenth century this renascent East 
Roman Empire had begun reconquering from D 5 r-al-Isl 5 m territories 
south-east of the Taurus which a moribund Roman Empire had lost in 
the seventh century to Primitive Muslim Arab conquerors.* By the same 
test the fortunes of the Syriac World must be judged to be now on the 
wane; yet, even on this crude and imperfect criterion of ordeal by battle, 
the Syriac Society was not yet so far gone in its decline as to have lost 
the upper hand in its contest with the barbarous Christians of the West. 

After the tide of Muslim conquest had begun to recede on land, it had 
continued for a time to advance at sea, and Orthodox Christendom as 
well as Western Christendom had been roughly handled in the ninth 
century by Maghribi Muslim buccaneers. They had wrested Crete out 
of the East Roman Empire’s grasp in a . d . 823 and Sicily in a . d . 840-902; 
in a . d . 904, under the leadership of an East Roman renegade, Leo of 
Tripoli, they had swooped down upon Salonica, the metropolis of the 
East Roman Empire’s surviving possessions in Continental European 
Greece; and in a . d . 949 they inflicted a disastrous defeat on an East 
Roman expeditionary force that had been commissioned to recapture a 
lost command of the Aegean Sea by driving the Maghribi Muslims out 
of their provocative Cretan outpost. The East Romans, however, did not 
acquiesce in this defeat, and they duly reconquered Crete in a second 
expedition in a . d . 961. No similar act of self-help is recorded to the 
credit of the Western Christians in the annals of their victimization by 
the Maghribi Muslims during the same period of Mediterranean naval 
history. 

The eighth-century Carolingians’ modest military achievements of 
expelling the Arab garrisons from Scptimania 3 and establishing a 
Frankish march in the southern foothills of the Eastern Pyrenees 4 had 
been more than offset in the ninth century, after the Carolingian 
Empire’s collapse, by the Maghribi buccaneers’ audacious seizure of 
commanding points in ex-Carolingian territory. Andalusian Muslim 
raiders had appeared again in Septimania in a . d . 841. 5 Garde Freynet 
(Fraxinetum), overhanging the coast of Provence, had been occupied 
circa a.d. 891-4, 6 and an equally well placed stronghold at the mouth of 
the Garigliano circa a . d . 885 ; and the Muslim aggressors had not allowed 
themselves to be confined to their beach-heads; they had almost suc- 

1 See IV. iv. 340-4. . _ * See IV. iv. 399. 

3 The date of the Frankish conquest of Narbonne was A.D. 751, according to Lrfvy- 

Provencal, E.: Hinoirt dr. I’Etpagne Mutulmane, vol. i (Cairo 1941, Institut Fran^ais 
d’Arch^ologic Orientale du Caire), p. 46. 

4 Gerona seceded to the Franks in a.d. 785 (ibid., p. 9s); Barcelona was conquered 
by them in a.d. 8oj (ibid., pp. 123 and 125-7). 

» See ibid., p. 148. 6 See ibid., p. 386. 



ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 349 
cccded in cutting Western Christendom in two by pushing inland from 
the Riviera and infesting the Alpine passes; 1 and between a . d . 840 and 
a . d . 876 they had come equally near to driving a wedge between Western 
and Orthodox Christendom by conquering the Lombard country in the 
lowlands of Apulia after they had gained a foothold in the intervening 
East Roman island of Sicily. The consummation of this Muslim con¬ 
quest of Apulia had been averted only because its imminence had moved 
the East Roman Government to intervene there in a . d . 876;* but, for 
the local Western Christian population of Southern Italy, the conse¬ 
quence had been, not liberation, but merely the substitution of alien 
East Roman Orthodox Christian for alien Maghrib! Muslim masters. 
Western Christendom’s narrow escape from losing Provence and the 
Western Christian parts of Italy to the Maghrib! Muslims 5 in the ninth 
and tenth centuries was due, not to Western Christian, but to East 
Roman, prowess. 4 

On this showing, a mid-tenth-ccntury Far Eastern observer of Far 
Western affairs could hardly have failed to forecast that, in this out¬ 
landish group of barely distinguishable yet mutually antipathetic local 
societies, the future lay with Orthodox Christendom, and that, whatever 
might be the destiny of the Syriac World, Western Christendom at any 
rate had no prospect of emerging from an impotence and obscurity that 
were the inevitable penalties of a benighted inefficiency. There can be 
little doubt that our observer would have been astonished at the actual 
event if he could have lived on to witness it. 

A more penetrating vision than could be expected of any contem¬ 
porary observer, alien or local, might perhaps have caught glimpses 
of the realities underlying the deceptive appearances of the mid-tenth- 
century scene in the environs of the Mediterranean. The deadly hidden 
weaknesses of Orthodox Christendom, which were so soon to be brought 
to light and were to become so glaringly evident in retrospect, have been 
analysed in this Study already in another context. 5 As for the Syriac 
World, it had been enjoying a spell of delusive well-being in a belated 
‘Indian Summer’ under a universal state which had been reconstituted 

1 The Muslims of Freynet had raided San Gall in a.d. 939 (ibid., p. 387). 

3 Sec IV. iv. 343-4. 

> During the years A.D. 880-915 the MaghribI Muslim raiders were ranging at will 
over Central Italy as far inland as the upper valley of the Tiber (Gay, L'Jlalie MM- 
dionale el VEmpire Byzanlin, 867-1071 (Paris 1904, Fontemoing), p. 159). 

♦ The Maghribi Muslim stronghold at the mouth of the Garigliano was smoked out 
in a.d. 915 by a combined effort of all the Western Christian communities in Central 
and Southern Italy under East Roman leadership, and this signal public service con¬ 
firmed the East Roman Empire’s recently established hegemony over all Western Christ¬ 
ian Italy south of the duchies of Rome and Spolcto (Gay, op. cit., p. 162). In a.d. 931 
and a.d. 942 the East Roman Navy made two unsuccessful attempts to help Hugh of 
Provence, who was connected by marriage with the East Roman imperial house of the 
day, to smoke the Muslims out of Garde Freynet (Schaube, A.: Handrhpeichiehle der 
Romanischen Vdlker dts Miltelmeergebiets bis sum Ende der Kreuzsuge (Munich and 
Berlin 1906, Oldcnbourg), p. 98). Thereafter a Western Christendom that had rallied 
under the auspices of the Saxon wardens of its north-eastern marches (sec II. ii. 167-8) 
did succeed in a.d. 973 in clearing the Maghribi Muslims out of both Garde Freynet 
and the Alpine passes by its own efforts (Schaube, op. cit., pp. 98 and 69). Yet, even after 
that, the Muslims demonstrated that they still retained their naval command of the 
Western Mediterranean by sacking Barcelona on the 7th July, 985 (Schaube, op. cit., 
p. 103; L 6 vy-Provenial, op. cit., p. 435), as they had sacked Genoa in a.d. 935 (Schaube, 
op. cit., p. 63). * See IV. iv. 320-408. 




350 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
in the shape of the Caliphate, after an Hellenic intrusion which had lasted 
for a thousand years, by latter-day Arab restorers of a prematurely 
overthrown Achaemenian Empire. 1 In the tenth century of the Christian 
Era the truth was that the Syriac Society was nearing the end of an 
abnormally prolonged old age, while a still adolescent Orthodox 
Christendom was in the more tragic plight of being already stricken 
with a mortal disease beneath the surface. Western Christendom had 
escaped this fate thanks to the failure of Charlemagne’s attempt to 
emulate Leo Syrus’s feat by saddling her with the incubus of a revival 
of the Roman Empire; and in the tenth century this apparently feeble 
and ineffective Western Society actually possessed hidden springs of 
vitality which were soon to well out in titanic activities on every plane 
of life. 

A discerning observer’s eye might have noticed that a Western 
Christian Society which had offered such slight resistance to its Muslim 
assailants from the Mediterranean had been valiantly and successfully 
fighting for its life against contemporary pagan Scandinavian assailants 
from the North Sea 2 and Magyar assailants from the Eurasian Steppe; 
and even against the Muslims the West had not been in retreat all along 
the line. The humiliating helplessness of Charlemagne’s Frankish 
cpigoni in Italy and Provence was balanced in the Iberian Peninsula by 
a gradual and inconspicuous but continuous and well-consolidated 
advance to the credit of the heirs of the Visigoths. By the second decade 
of the tenth century of the Christian Era, which saw the Muslim Power 
in the Peninsula raised by the Cordovan Umayyad Caliph ‘Abd-ar- 
Rahman III An-Nasir (imperabat A.D. 912-61) to a zenith at which it 
continued to stand until its sudden collapse in a.d. 1009, the remnant of 
the Kingdom of Visigothia which had survived in the mountain-fast¬ 
nesses of Cantabria and Asturia had reoccupied all but the headwaters 
of the basin of the Douro and, on the west coast, had pushed on beyond 
into the valley of the Mondego; 3 and, though ‘Abd-ar-Rahman and his 

1 This aspect of the Arab Caliphate as a resumption of the Achaemenian Empire has 
been noticed in I. i. 76-77. 1 See II. ii. 194-202. 

5 The Arabs had relaxed their hold on the north-west comer of the Iberian Peninsula 
while they had been making the attempt to conquer Aquitaine from the Franks which 
had ended so disastrously in A.D. 73 * (see L6vy-Provencal, op. cit., p. 49), and the Ber¬ 
ber colonists of this region had then been weakened first by a series of unsuccessful 
revolts against their Arab overlords and afterwards by a re-exodus en masie to North- 
West Africa during a five-years' famine circa A.D. 750-5 (ibid., pp. 37 and 50). In con¬ 
sequence, King Alfonso I of Asturia (regnabal a.d. 739-57) was able to reoccupy the 
whole of the Douro (Ducro) Basin from Osma downwards (ibid., pp. 49-50). Oporto, 
at the mouth of the Douro, was conquered in A.D. 868 (ibid., p. 223), and Coimbra, 
at the mouth of the Mondego, in A.D. 878 (ibid., p. 224). King Alfonso II (regnabal 
a.d. 791-842) had actually occupied Lisbon from a.d. 709 to 808/9 (ibid., p. 122). 
Garcia I (regnabat a.d. 910-14) transferred the capital of Asturia from Oviedo—the 
refugee Pelayo’a fastness between the Asturian mountains and the north coast—to 
Le6n at the mountains' southern foot (ibid., p. 305), which the Muslims had retaken in 
a.d. 846 but had failed to hold (ibid., p. 144); and in a.d. 9x3, three years before the 
opening of 'Abd-ar-Rahmin Ill's counter-offensive, Ordono II had raided Evora 
(ibid., p. 305) from his Galician appanage. Alfonso III (regnabal a.d. 866-010) had con¬ 
solidated Asturia’s gain* by repopulating the devastated marches with Christian 
(muila'rib) refugees from territories under Muslim rule (ibid., p. 228); but Asturia still 
remained open to invasion from Andalusia round the north-east corner of the Guada- 
rrama mountain range so long as the head waters of the Duero remained in Muslim hands— 
and, till after the collapse of the Muslim power in the Peninsula in a.d. 1009. San Esteban 
de Cormaz and Osma remained the farthest outposts of the Asturian Kingdom towards 



ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 351 
no less puissant successor the dictator Abu ‘Amir Muhammad Al- 
Mansur (dominabatur a.d. 981-1002) found themselves able to raid the 
Asturian kingdom and its diminutive independent Christian neighbours, 
Navarre and Aragon, at will and to compel them to acknowledge 
Andalusia’s hegemony, neither of these great Andalusian Muslim soldiers 
and statesmen succeeded in permanently rcoccupying, not to speak of 
recolonizing, any of the country that had been recovered by Visigothia’s 
Asturian successor-state in the course of the century and a half preced¬ 
ing ‘Abd-ar-Rahman’s accession. 

This retransfer of a remote and uninviting corner of the Iberian 
Peninsula from Muslim to Western Christian hands, and its still more 
significant retention in Christian hands throughout the ordeal of a.d. 
qib'-iooq, passed almost unnoticed at the time, but, in retrospect, the 
failure of An-Nasir and Al-Mansur to complete a Muslim conquest of 
the Peninsula, which had been all but completed, some mo hundred 
years before An-Nasir resumed the task, by the first Arab conquistador 
Musa b. Nusayr, could be seen to have signified the turn of a tide which 
in the following century was to carry the Western Crusaders from the 
Douro to the Jordan and beyond; and the shrine of St. James at 
Compostela, in this out-of-the-way province which was the first frag¬ 
ment of D 5 r-al-Isl 3 m to fall into Western Christian hands, was already 
becoming second only to Jerusalem itself in attractiveness as a goal for 
Western Christian pilgrims. 1 

These entries on the credit side of a tenth-century Western Christen¬ 
dom’s military account are not insignificant, but they are less significant 
than their accompaniments on the cultural plane. In France and England 
the Scandinavian invaders were not only brought to a halt, but those of 
them who were not ejected from the invaded territories were so whole¬ 
heartedly captivated by a Western Christian culture which they had 
failed to wipe out that they became its champions instead of its assailants. 1 
In the same century this Western Christian Civilization showed itself 
worthy of its new proselytes’ devotion by taking the first step towards 
putting its own house in order. The spiritual citadel of Early Medieval 
Western Christendom was monasticism, and the tenth-century Cluniac 
rejuvenation of the Benedictine way of monastic life was the archetype of 
all subsequent Western social reforms, religious and secular. 

These unobtrusive signs of fresh life in a tenth-century Western 
Christendom are impressive when we bring them to light; yet, even 
when they have been given all their due, they seem hardly adequate to 
account for the amazing outburst of energy in an eleventh-century 
Western Christendom—an outburst in which the outbreak of aggression 
against the two neighbouring societies was one of the less creative and 
less estimable episodes. At the turn of the tenth and eleventh centuries 

the South-East (ibid., p. 228). Toward* the North-East, Pampeluna, which had shaken 
off the Arab yoke in a.d. 798 (ibid., p. 125), had become the principal city of the in¬ 
dependent Basque Christian Kingdom of Navarre. 

1 This was the year in which 'Abd-ar-Rahman opened his offensive against the 
Asturian Christians according to L^vy-Provenqal, op. cit., p. 306. 

* Compostela had been a pilgrimage resort since the ninth century (ibid., p. 4 +t). 
When Al-Mansllr raided it in a.d. 997, he spared the tomb of the Apostle St. James 
(ibid., pp. 440 and 442). » Sec II. li. 201-2. 



352 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
the Western Christian Civilization followed up its feat of captivating 
the Scandinavian interlopers in Normandy and the Danelaw, and 
matched the Orthodox Christian Civilization’s contemporary feat of 
converting the Scandinavian makers of Russia, by bringing within its 
fold the Scandinavian war-bands in their native lairs, as well as the 
continental barbarians of Hungary and Poland. 1 In the eleventh century 
the fundamental Cluniac reform of Western monastic life was followed 
up by the more ambitious Hildcbrandine reform of the whole constitu¬ 
tion and discipline of the Western Church, while the obscure conquest 
of the north-western comer of the Iberian Peninsula was followed up by 
a sensational forward movement along the entire length of the Mediter¬ 
ranean. In the Iberian Peninsula the eleventh-century Western Christian 
conquistadores established their ascendancy over the Cordovan Umayyad 
Caliphate’s successor-states by conquering Toledo. In the Central 
Mediterranean they overran the East Roman Empire’s dominions in 
Southern Italy and went on to conquer Sicily from Muslim intruders 
on Greek Orthodox Christian ground whom the East Roman Govern¬ 
ment had first failed to keep out and afterwards failed to eject. In the 
Levant, where they were operating at the opposite extremity of the 
Mediterranean Basin from their West European base, the Western 
Crusaders eclipsed in one expedition all the conquests, at the expense of 
the ‘Abbasid Caliphate’s successor-states, which it had taken the East 
Romans a century and a half (a.d. 927-1071) to win and one campaign 
to lose, by carving out, in and after ‘the First Crusade’ ( gerebatur a.d. 
x 095-9), a chain of Western Christian principalities extending continu¬ 
ously from Antioch and Edessa through Tripoli to Jerusalem. 2 

« Sec II. ii. 168 and IV. iv. 378-9. 

1 In this eleventh-century forward movement the Normans and the North Italian 
maritime city-states Venice, Pisa, and Genoa were active on all three fronts; the North¬ 
ern French, other than the Normans, made an appearance on the Iberian front (see 
V. v. 242, n. 4) and turned out in force to take part in the First Crusade; the 
Southern French likewise went into action on the Syrian front, but not (sec Schaubc, 
op. tit., p. too) on either the Iberian or the Central Mediterranean front, though these 
two theatres of operations lay at their door. 

On the Iberian front the Western Christians' eleventh-century successes were mostly 
achieved between a.d. 1009, when the Cordovan Muslim power collapsed, and a.d. 
1086, when the Murfibit Muslim Berber barbarians from Africa made their first passage 
of the Straits of Gibraltar in response to an appeal from some of the Cordovan Cali- 

F (hate’s successor-states for help against their Western Christian barbarian assailants 
rom Europe. The most important permanent Western Christian advance in the Penin¬ 
sula in this chapter of history was the conquest of Toledo in A.D. 1085 by King Alfonso 
VI of Castile; but. far beyond the limits of the conquered territories, the Western Christ¬ 
ian transfrontier barbarians exerted their power over the Peninsular Muslim inuluk-at- 
taK&'if of the day by raiding their dominions, compelling them to purchase immunity 
from raids by paying tribute, and even establishing permanent cantonments of Western 
Christinn war-bands in Muslim territore. Garcia Jimenea' cantonment at Aledo (a.d. 
1085-92) may be compared with the fifth-century settlements of Visigoths and Bur- 

K ndians in the Roman dominions in Gaul, and the Cid’s and his heirs' 'protectorate' 
rebalur a.d. 1086-92 and 1094-1102) over the Muslim principality of Valencia with 
the fifth-century domination of Ricimer over the Roman Imperial Government at 
Ravenna. 

On the Central Mediterranean front the Pisans and Genoese were the first to move. 
The sack of Genoa by the Maghribi Muslims in a.d. 935 was avenged when the Muslims 
were driven out of Sardinia in a.d. iot6 by the combined efforts of the Genoese and the 
Pisans and when the Pisans raided Bona in the Maghrib in a.d. 1034 (Schaube, op. cit., 
p. 50). From A.p. 1040 onwards the naval operations of the two North-West Italian 
maritime republics on this front were followed up by the conquests of the Normans on 
land—though a Pisan attack on Palermo in a.d. 1063 failed for lack of concerted action 



ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 353 

The eventual collapse of the Medieval Western Christian ascendancy 
in the Mediterranean Basin that had thus been imposed at one amazing 
swoop would have been no less surprising to a Far Eastern observer re¬ 
surveying the scene 150 years after the First Crusade and 300 years after 
the time, half-way through the tenth century, when the fortunes of 
Western Christendom had been at their nadir. 

In reckoning up the profits and losses of a century and a half of in¬ 
cessant strife, our imaginary mid-thirteenth-century observer would 
have noted that, in their distant and exposed outposts in Syria, the 
Western Christian aggressors had lost all their conquests except a few 
bridgeheads within three-quarters of a century. The territorial spoils 
of the First Crusade (gerebatur a . d . 1095-9) neither been preserved 
by the Second Crusade {gerebatur a.d. 1146-9) nor recovered by the 
Third {gerebatur a . d . ii 87‘-92), which was the most fiercely contested 
of these three successive trials of strength between Western aggressors 
and an Islamic World at bay; and the virtuosity of Frederick II Hohen- 
staufen’s accommodation with the Ayyubid Kamil in a . d . 1228-9 2 could 

on the Normans’ part, while, conversely, a single-handed Norman attack against Palermo 
and Girgcnti in a.d. 1064 was likewise a failure, with the consequence that Palermo 
was able to hold out against the Normans till A.D. 1072 (Chalandon, F.: Hittoire de la 
Domination Normande en Italie et en Sidle (Paris 1907, Picard, 2 vola.), vol. i, pp. 203, 
204, and 207-8; Schaube, op. cit., p. so). The Pisans and Genoese did not succeed in 
expelling the Muslims from Corsica till a.d. 1091 (sec V. v. 244 and 622, n. 3). 

Along the Mediterranean coast of the Iberian Peninsula the sack of Barcelona by the 
Muslims in A.D. 985 was avenged in the conquest of Almcria by the Genoese in A.D. 
1046 and in the joint Genoese-Catalan expedition against Tortosa in a.d. 1092-3 
(Schaube, op. cit., p. 64). The final demonstration that the ’thalassocracy’ of the Western 
Mediterranean Basin had now passed from the Maghrib! Muslims to the Western 
Christians was given by the sensational success of the Pisan naval expedition against 
Mahdiyah in a.d. 1087. The principality of Mahdiyah was compelled to acknow¬ 
ledge the suzerainty of the Pope and to open its doors to Pisan and Genoese traders. 
The local prince Tamim’s son was earned away captive to Pisa, where he settled 
down to serve as town crier (Schaube, op. cit., pp. 50-51)—as Perseus the last king of 
Macedon's son Alexander had settled down in his Roman captivity to serve as town clerk 
in the rural Latin colony Alba Fucensis. 

1 Reckoning the war as beginning with Saladin’s assault on the Kingdom of Jeru¬ 
salem in A.D. 1187, rather than with the Western Christian counter-attack in A.D. 1x89. 

J Frederick’s first move was to make an alliance with KSmil, whose dominions were 
at the moment confined to Egypt, against Kamil’s brother Mu'azzam, the prince of 
Damascus, whose Syrian dominions were the target of Frederick’s prospective territorial 
claims. This astute step was unexpectedly countered by the unforeseen accident of 
Mu'azzam’s death, which robbed Kamil’s alliance with Frederick of its original value 
in Kamil’s calculations and at the same time gave Kimil a persona! interest in the Syrian 
portion of the Ayyubid dominions, which had now passed into his hands. Notwithstand¬ 
ing this unpropitious change in the situation, Frederick succeeded in persuading Kamil 
to cede to him Jerusalem (minus the Haram-ash-Sharif), Bethlehem, and Nazareth, 
together with one corridor of territory connecting Bethlehem and Jerusalem, and another 
connecting Nazareth, with the surviving bridgeheads of the Kingdom of Jerusalem 
along the Syrian coast. This remarkable diplomatic achievement was mainly due to the 
moderation shown by both parties in contenting themselves with the satisfaction of their 
minimum desiderata. Kimil was content to retain the principal Islamic holy place in 
Palestine, without seeking to drive the Franks into the sea, while Frederick was content 
to recover the principal Christian holy places in Palestine without seeking once again to 
insulate the Asiatic from the African domain of Dir-al-Isl 5 m. A contributory cause of 
the settlement of a.d. 1228-9 was Frederick’s ability and readiness to come on to the 
other party’s ground. Frederick personally conducted in Arabic his negotiations with 
Kamil s envoy Fakhr-ad-Din, and he fraternized with the local Muslims throughout his 
stay in the Levant (sec Kantorowicz, E.: Frederick the Second, 1194-1230 (London 
1931, Constable), pp. 176-99). 

If the Western Christians had been sincere in their profession that the liberation of the 
Christian holy places in Palestine was the objective of their military expeditions to the 
Levant, they would have been constrained to admit that, after their decisive and 

B 2808 . vm N 



354 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
not conceal the hard fact that in Syria the invaders had failed—in spite 
of the opening offered to them by the decay of the ‘FStimid’ Shl'I 
Anticaliphate before the rise of the ‘ Abbasid Sunni Caliphate’s vigorous 
AyyQbid successor-state—to achieve their strategic objective of insulat¬ 
ing the Asiatic from the African and Iberian provinces of D 5 r-al-Islam. 
They had also failed to exploit an opportunity in Ifrikiyah of insulating 
the Muslim citadel in Egypt from Maghrib-al-AqsS and Andalusia during 
the lull between the recession of the ‘FStimid’ wave of Berber invaders 
from Eastern Kabylia and the onrush of a mightier wave of Muwahhid 
Berber invaders from the Atlas . 1 The bridgeheads that the Norman 
kingdom of Sicily had begun to establish along the coasts of Tunisia 
and Tripolitania in a . d . 1134 had all been swept away again by a . d . 
1158. 

In the Iberian Peninsula, on the other hand, all that was left of the 
former Islamic domain by the middle of the thirteenth century was an 
enclave round Granada; and this was not the only front on which 
Western Christendom had been recouping herself for her losses in Syria. 
The vigour of the resistance that the Third Crusade had encountered in 
colliding with the rejuvenated Sunni Muslim Power which Saladin had 
taken over and built up had moved the Crusaders to seek alternative 
satisfaction for their cupidity at the expense of a less truculent victim. 
The lead which the Normans had given by conquering East Roman 
Italy (a.d. 1040-81) and going on to attack the broader East Roman 
dominions east of the Adriatic (a.d. 1081-5 and 1185-91) had been 
followed up by Richard Coeur-de-Lion when he had seized the East 
Roman island of Cyprus in a.d. i 191, and by the captains of the Fourth 
Crusade when they had allowed their course to be diverted from its 
original objective in Syria to Constantinople in a.d. 1203. Mid-way 
through the thirteenth century a French emperor was reigning at 
Constantinople, a French marquis at Bodonitsa, a French duke at Athens, 
and a French prince in the Morea, while there were few' Greek islands 
in the Aegean that had not fallen into Italian hands. Yet these unseemly 
conquests at a sister Christian society’s expense were not the chief 
ground for hope in the minds of Western Crusaders of the generation of 
St. Louis. They were less concerned to console themselves with Ortho¬ 
dox Christian spoils for reverses at Muslim hands than to retrieve these 
reverses with the aid of Nestorian Christian allies. 

The forgotten Nestorian Christendom of the Far East had dramati¬ 
cally appeared above the Western Crusaders’ eastern horizon in the 

definitive military defeat by Saladin, their objective had been rcattained for them by 
Frederick’* diplomacy on terns* which were guaranteed by the auspicious fact that on 
this occasion they had been voluntarily conceded by the local Muslim Power. Jerusalem 
was indeed soon wrested again out of Frankish hands by force of arms; but this time the 
assailants were not the Terre d’Outre Mer’s AyyQbid neighbours but the remote 
Khwarizmian wardens of Dir-al-Islam’s north-eastern march, who were hurled into the 
AyyQbid ar.d Frankish dominions in Syria in a.d. 1243-4 by the irresistible impetus of 
their headlong flight before the face of the pursuing Mongols. 

1 This opportunity was particularly favourable for a Frankish barbarian invader, 
since, after the successful defection of the Sanhaja Berbers of Western Kabylia from the 
FStimids in a.d. 1043. Ifrikiyah had been devastated by the barbarian Nomad Arab 
Banu Hilal and Banu Sulaym, who had been unleashed against the Sanhaja by the Fati- 
mids (see Gautier, E. F.: Let SUclts Obscun du Maghreb (Paris 1927, Payot), pp. 368-9). 



ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 355 

train of the Mongol Eurasian Nomad world-conquerors. There were 
Nestorian Uighur Turkish secretaries in the Mongols’ service who had 
won their masters’ gratitude and confidence by meeting a sudden need 
for clerks’ work which had arisen from the Mongols’ lightning-swift 
acquisition of an oecumenical empire, 1 while on the other hand the 
Muslims whom the Mongols had been subjugating in rapidly increasing 
numbers since their invasion of the Khwarizm Shah’s dominions in 
a.d. 1220 had fallen foul of pagan rulers whose regulations were irrecon¬ 
cilable with the ritual prescriptions of the SharVah 2 Might not the 
Western Christians and the Far Eastern Christians manage, by a joint 
effort, to convert the Mongols to Christianity and then enlist their 
invincible converts in a common anti-Muslim crusade which would have 
the finality of a war of annihilation ? The Mongols, as they had already 
demonstrated, had the will and the power to commit ‘genocide’. How, 
then, could the Muslims escape extermination if they were encircled by 
ruthless Christian assailants attacking them simultaneously on a con¬ 
tinental as well as a maritime front ? 

The seriousness with which these hopes were taken in a mid¬ 
thirteenth-century Western Christendom was indicated by the missions 
to the Mongol Khaqan’s court at Qaraqorum on which Friar Giovanni 
di Piano Carpini was dispatched by Pope Innocent IV in a.d. 1246 and 
Friar William of Rubruck by Saint Louis in a.d. i253. J Yet this Christian 
grand design for the extirpation of Islam proved to be a castle in the air. 
The critical years in which the opportunity came and went were a.d. 
1258-62. In a.d. 1258 the Mongols dealt Islam a stunning blow by taking 
and sacking Baghdad and putting an end to the Baghdadi ‘Abbasid 
Caliphate; in a.d. 1260 they crossed the Euphrates under a Nestorian 
Christian commander and occupied Damascus, within not much more 
than a hundred miles of the Western Crusaders’ still-surviving bridge¬ 
head at Acre. 4 At that moment the converging Christian forces were 
within an ace of joining hands; 5 but the junction was never made, though 
Mongol armies crossed the Euphrates once again, in a.d. 1281, 6 before 
the Western bridgehead at Acre was pinched out by the Ayyubids’ 
Mamluk successors in a.d. 1291. 

Meanwhile, the liquidation of the French conquests in the former 
domain of the East Roman Empire, which had begun on the very morrow 
of the Franco-Venctian sack of Constantinople in a.d. 1204, had suddenly 
gathered momentum. In a.d. 1259 the GreekOrthodox Christian Emperor 
of Nicaca, Michael Palaiologhos, had overthrown and captured Prince 

* See II. ii. 238. 

* Sec VI. vii. 257 and X. ix. 36. > See II. ii. 451. 

* This is the approximate distance by the shortest of the several alternative practicable 
routes, which runs (in the direction Acre-Damascus) via Ramah, Safad, and the Bridge 
of Jacob’s Daughters spanning the Jordan between the Sea of Galilee and Lake Banyas, 
whence it travels on to Damascus through Qunaytirah. This shortest route is an arduous 
one, since it clambers over the southernmost spurs of both Lebanon and Antilebanon, 
but the easiest alternative route—running south-eastward from Acre through the Vale 
of Esdraelon, crossing the Jordan below the Sea of Galilee instead of above it, and then 
turning north-north-eastward—is about half as long again. A description of these and 
other alternative routes between Acre and Damascus is given by Sir George Adam 
Smith in The Historical Geography of the Holy Land (London 1904, Hodder and 
Stoughton), pp. 426-8. 

* See Ii. ii. 238 and 451, and p. 222, above. 


6 See I. i. 3S o. 


356 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
William II of the Morea at the Battle of Pclagonia; in a.d. 1261 he 
evicted the French from Constantinople; and in a.d. 1262 he extorted 
from his Moreot French captive the cession of three fortresses in the 
Morea' as the price of his release. In thus progressively driving the 
French out of the territories that they had stolen from the East Roman 
Empire in the Balkan Peninsula, the Nicaean Greek Orthodox Christians 
were working, not for themselves, but for their more effective Ottoman 
Turkish Muslim successors. 2 Michael Palaioldghos, the Nicaean con¬ 
queror of Constantinople, was the forerunner of her subsequent Brusan 
conqueror Mehmed FStih; and the Greek Orthodox Christian dynasty 
of which Michael was the founder spent a considerable part of its con¬ 
stantly dwindling resources for 170 years (a.d. 1262-1432) out of its 194 
years-long tenure of power (a.d. 1259-1453) in doggedly reconquering 
the Morea, foot by foot, from its interloping Western Christian masters. 
The din of arms clashing in this parochial inter-Christian strife echoed 
so loudly from the flanks of Mount Erymanthus that both the bands of 
Moreot Christian combatants were deaf to the thunder of an Ottoman 
battle-axe staving in the gates of the Hexamfli. The reconquest of the 
Morea was completed by Constantine Dhrdghasis as Greek prince of the 
Morea in a.d. 1432, twenty-one years before he died in Constantinople 
at Saint Romanus’s Gate as the last of the East Roman Emperors. As 
both prince and emperor, he had served in effect as the Padishah’s 
bailiff, and the Ottoman conqueror duly followed up his occupation of 
Constantinople by taking over a reconquered Morea from a slaughtered 
Constantine’s brothers Thomas and Demetrius in a.d. 1460. 

Thus, of all the territorial gains at the expense of Dar-al-Islam and 
Romania that the Western Crusaders had made in the basin of the 
Mediterranean from- the eleventh century to the thirteenth, the only 
substantial portions that remained in Western hands at the close of the 
fifteenth century were Sicily, Calabria, Apulia, and Andalusia. These 
exiguous fruits of such arduous labour were, however, supplemented by 
some eleventh-hour acquisitions on a Russian Orthodox Christian front. 
The crusading energies that had been diverted at the turn of the twelfth 
and thirteenth centuries from Syria to Romania, as an easier option than 
a front on which the adversary to be faced was now the redoubtable 
Ayyubid Power, were soon re-diverted again from a Romania whose 
native Greek Orthodox Christians had been stung by the outrage of 
a.d. 1204 into a desperate resistance culminating in a spirited counter¬ 
attack. As the Crusaders’ conquests in Romania melted away in their 
turn, the Western Christian military adventurers began to despair of 
an indomitable Mediterranean and to seek fairer fortunes in a more 
amenable Baltic. 

The Teutonic Knights, who decamped at the turn of the thirteenth 
and fourteenth centuries from Syria to the Vistula via Transylvania, 3 
carved out a new Baltic domain for themselves at the expense of pagan 
Prussians, Letts, and Ests; but the main effect of their operations in this 
East European theatre was indirect. They made little headway against 
cither their pagan Lithuanian or their Western Christian Polish neigh- 
1 Moncmvaala, Maina (Mani), Miami. * See III. iii. 27. * See II. ii. 172. 



ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 357 

bours, but the military prowess which they unintentionally inspired in 
these intended victims of theirs, by forcing them to fight for their lives, 
found an outlet in the fourteenth century in extensive Polish and 
Lithuanian conquests at the expense of a Russian Orthodox Christendom 
which had fallen into disunity in the twelfth century and had been 
ground to powder by the impact of the Mongols in the thirteenth. 1 This 
Western Christian encroachment on a Russian Orthodox Christendom’s 
domain survived, as we have seen, 2 into the Modern Age of Western 
history after the liquidation of all the Medieval Western Christian con¬ 
quests east of the Ionian Islands in a Greek Orthodox Christendom. 

If we ask ourselves why it was that a Medieval Western Christendom’s 
lasting gains of territory from the Crusades amounted only to such dis¬ 
proportionately small returns for so gigantic an expenditure of effort, we 
shall find more than one answer to our question. 

One obvious explanation of the ultimate defeat of the Crusades lies 
in the excessive dispersion of the Western aggressors’ energies. They 
attacked their neighbours on no less than five fronts—in the Iberian 
Peninsula, in South Italy, in the Balkan Peninsula, in Syria, and in the 
Continental European borderland between Western Christendom and 
Russia—and it is not surprising that they should have failed to obtain 
any decisive results from this improvident use of a limited fund of sur¬ 
plus Western energy which might have carried their offensive forward 
to some permanently tenable ‘natural frontier’ if it had been concen¬ 
trated steadily on any single front out of the five. 

If the French Crusaders, for example, had concentrated their efforts on 
reinforcing an Iberian front that lay at France’s doors, Western Christen¬ 
dom might have reached the natural frontier of the Sahara, not in the 
twentieth century, but in the thirteenth, instead of halting for a quarter 
of a millennium—from the fifth decade of the thirteenth century to 
a.d. 1492 —at the foothills of the Sierra Nevada and then for more than 
four centuries thereafter at the Straits of Gibraltar, which in all previous 
ages had been a bridge and not a barrier between the Iberian Peninsula 
and the Maghrib. The impetus of Western Christian aggression against 
the Maghrib! province of Dar-al-Isl 5 m was weakened by the division of 
Western Christian forces between an Iberian and an Apulian front; yet, 
even so, if the Normans who headed for Apulia instead of Lc6n had 
concentrated thenceforward on this single new enterprise, they might 
perhaps still have reached a Saharan natural frontier on this Central 
Mediterranean front likewise, via Sicily and Tunisia. Instead, they 
dispersed their energies once again by invading the Transadriatic 
dominions of the East Roman Empire in a.d. 1081 before they had com¬ 
pleted their conquest of Sicily, and then riding off on the First Crusade 
to carve out a Syrian principality for themselves round Antioch. 3 

I See II. ii. 172-3. «nd p. 399, below. * On p. 126, above. 

J The fantastically far-flung enterprise in Asia, in which Bohemond indulged in A.D. 
1097, had been anticipated in a.d. 1073-4 by a compatriot of his sumanted Russell, who 
had attempted to take advantage of the crushing defeat of the East Romans by the 
Saljuqs at Mclazkerd (Manrikert) in a.d. 1071 in order to carve out a Norman prin¬ 
cipality in the East Roman Empire’s Armeniac army-corps district in North-Eastern 
Anatolia (sec further, p. 389, n. 1, below). 



358 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
Thereafter, when the Normans did tardily embark on the conquest of 
Ifrlqlyah in a.d. i 134, they allowed themselves to be diverted from carry¬ 
ing this African enterprise through to completion by being drawn into a 
great war with the East Roman Empire (gerebatur a.d. i 147-5 6 ) which 
was as exhausting as it was inconclusive. 

The Levantine front that was opened up in the First Crusade had to 
compete with the demands of the already active fronts in the Central 
and the Western Mediterranean, yet the residue of Western Christian 
military effort that could be mobilized for action in Syria might still 
perhaps have sufficed to establish a tenable frontier in this distant 
theatre of operations if the Crusaders had been prudent enough to re¬ 
frain from straying across the Euphrates and resolute enough to push 
forward to the fringe of the North Arabian Steppe all along the line 
from the right bank of the Euphrates to the head of the Gulf of ‘Aqabah. 
They did succeed in reaching this natural frontier at its southern end, 
and thereby momentarily insulating Cairo from Damascus, and Mecca 
from both, by planting outposts of the Kingdom of Jerusalem at Aylah 
and Karak; 1 but these strategically momentous acquisitions remained as 
precarious as they were provocative so long as the left flank of the Western 
intruders’ Transjordanian salient remained open to counter-attack from 
Dar-al-Islam’s vast unconquercd Asiatic interior. This deadly gap in 
the defences of the Terre d’Outre Mer could have been closed at the 
outset by the leaders of the First Crusade if, instead of crossing the 
Euphrates to seize an untenable Edessa, they had expended an equal 
amount of energy on occupying the key position of Aleppo between 
Antioch and the Syrian bank of the Euphrates and on securing all the 
crossings of the Euphrates between the southern spurs of the Antitaurus 
and the northern fringe of the North Arabian Steppe; for, had they thus 
sealed Syria off at the northern end, as they afterwards duly sealed it off 
at the southern end by occupying Karak and ‘Aqabah, they could then 
have reduced Hamah, Homs, and Damascus at their leisure; and this 
strategy would have driven between a Sunni Muslim Caliphate in ‘Iraq 
and a Shl’I Muslim Anticaliphate in Egypt a wedge of Frankish territory 
that might have been proof against any Muslim blow that could have 
been struck at it from either side. 

In the event, the Crusaders’ neglect of the natural frontier offered by 
the elbow of the Euphrates 2 was to deliver them into the hands of a re- 

» In pushing inland from the southern end of the Shephelah across the Negeb to¬ 
wards the Red Sea, the Crusaders were following in the tracks of the Cherethites and 
anticipating the strategy of the Zionists (sec VI. vii. 102, n. 1, and p. 309, above). In 
building their Transjordanian castle at Karak, they were establishing themselves astride 
an historic ‘King’s Highway' which had latterly become the main pilgrimage-road to 
Mecca from the Asiatic provinces of Dir-al-Islim (see VI. vii. 101-2). 

1 The fecklessness of the Crusaders in neglecting this natural line of defence stands 
out in glaring contrast to the prudence shown by their Mamlilk successors and their 
Roman predecessors in profiting by it. Along the line of the Middle Euphrates the 
MamlQks held at bay a Mongol Empire which extended across the Continent from the 
Euphrates to the Pacific at the time when the Mamltiks made the river into the moat of 
their ‘Fortress Egypt’. In the long history of the eastern frontier of the Roman Empire, 
Pompey’s prudence in 64 b.c. in making the Middle Euphrates the limit of his new 
Roman province of Syria was vindicated by the disaster that overtook Crassus at Carrhae 
in 54 B.C. and by the difficulties in which Trajan involved himself in a.d. 114-17 (see 
Lepper, F. A.: Trajan'1 Parthian War (London 1948, Cumbcrlegc), pp. 95-96) when 



ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 359 
juvenated Sunni Muslim Power which the challenge of the Crusades 
called into existence. This new Power’s first base of operations was Triq, 
whose irrigation-system, which was the source of its agricultural pro¬ 
ductivity, had not yet been wrecked by Mongol barbarian invaders ; 1 
and the first in the scries of warrior-statesmen who built this Power up 
was Zcngl {dominabatur a . d . 1127-46), who was appointed in a . d . 1127 
by the Saljuq Imperial Government to be atJbeg (count) of the metro¬ 
politan province of a shrunken 'Abbasid Caliphate which the Saljuqs 
had liberated from the domination of the Shl'i Buwayhids in a . d . 1055. 2 
Within a year of his installation at Baghdad, Zengl won for himself 
a dominion of his own by annexing Mosul and the Ja2irah; and he 
immediately followed up these conquests on the east side of the Euphrates 
by crossing the river and releasing the stalwart outpost city of Aleppo 
from its encirclement by the Frankish principalities of Edessa and 
Antioch. Edessa, now encircled in its turn, fell to Zengl in a . d . 1144; 
Zengl’s son and successor Nur-ad-Din (dominabatur a . d . 1146-74) was 
able to hold his ground west of the Euphrates against the Second 
Crusade (gerebatur a . d . 1146-9), and Nur-ad-Din’s subsequent annexa¬ 
tion of Damascus in a.d. 1154 provided his lieutenant Shlrkuh and 
Shirkuh’s nephew, colleague, and successor Saladin with a base of 

B ions for breaking through the screen of Frankish outposts between 
and *Aqabah in order to compete with Amalric King of Jerusalem 
for the conquest of Egypt from a decrepit Fatimid Shl'i regime. 

Three successive pairs of rival expeditions (gesta a.d. 1163-4, 1167, 
1168-9) ended in Egypt’s remaining in Saladin’s hands. The Western 
intruders’ Terre d'Outre Mer then found itself enveloped by its Sunni 
Muslim adversaries, and this encirclement spelled the doom of the 
Frankish Power in Syria; but Saladin was too good a strategist to strike 
before he had consolidated his now commanding position. In a.d. 1171 
he extinguished the Fatimid Anticaliphate and restored de jure the 
sovereignty of an 'Abbasid Caliphate at Baghdad over an Egypt whose 
resources were at Saladin’s own disposal de facto. Thereafter he rounded 
off his empire by first annexing Tripolitania, the Eastern Sudan, and the 
Yaman (a.d. i 172-4) and then, after the death of his overlord Nur-ad- 
Dln, making himself master of everything between the eastern borders 
of the Frankish principalities in Syria and the western foothills of the 
Zagros in Kurdistan (a.d. 1174-86).* When he struck at the Franks at 
last in a.d. 1187 the result was a foregone conclusion. The Third 
Crusade could not save the Terre d’Outre Mer from being reduced to 
a few bridgeheads along the Syrian coast. 

he attempted to move the frontier forward perhaps as far as to the head of the Persian 
Gulf. No permanent annexation of Asiatic territory east of the Euphrates was made by 
the Roman Imperial Government till a.d. 194-9. when the Parthian Power was in 
extremis, and on this occasion the frontier was moved forward no farther than to the line 
of the Euphrates’ eastern tributary the Khabur. 

1 For the coup degrdee which the Mongols dealt to the Syriac Civilization by wrecking 
the irrigation-system of 'Iraq in the thirteenth century of the Christian Era, see IV, iv. 

43 * See I. i. 356. 

J Saladin conquered Eastern Syria, south of Aleppo, in a.d. 1174; established his 
suzerainty over Aleppo in A.D. 1176; conquered the Jazirah and annexed Aleppo in a.d. 
1182-3; and established his suzerainty over Mosul in a.d. 1186. 



360 encounters between contemporaries 

The characteristically short-sighted counter-movc of the leaders of 
the Fourth Crusade to Saladin’s conclusive defeat of the Third Crusade 
in Syria was, as we have seen, to commit a now hard-pressed Western 
Christendom to yet a fourth Mediterranean front in the domain of the 
East Roman Empire; and here the disastrous effects of the Western 
aggressors’ persistent dispersion of their energies made themselves felt 
more signally and more swiftly than in any other theatre. A Frankish host 
that was strong enough to deal the East Roman Empire an irretrievable 
blow by storming and sacking its sacrosanct and hitherto impregnable 
capital had not the strength to seize more than a handful of the fragments 
into which the shattered empire broke up, and even these meagre pick¬ 
ings slipped, one by one, out of the covetous Frankish hand that had 
clutched them. A Monferratine ‘Kingdom of Salonica’ lasted no longer 
than eighteen years ( a . d . 1204-22), and a French ‘empire’ at Constan¬ 
tinople no longer than fifty-seven (a.d. 1204-61), while the French 
Principality of the Morea melted away less rapidly, but not less in¬ 
exorably, from a . d . 1262 onwards. 1 The Italian city-states alone showed 
a capacity for retaining and increasing their share of the spoils that the 
Fourth Crusade had picked up from the wreckage of a wantonly shattered 
East Roman Empire. 

A second explanation of the failure of the Crusades is to be found in 
the disappointment of the Crusaders’ fond hope that a heaven-sent 
‘Prester John’ would miraculously redress in Christendom’s favour a 
balance which Saladin’s geniu3 had inclined so heavily to the advantage 
of the Crusaders’ Muslim adversaries. In the event, the Mongol world- 
conquerors did not become converts to a Christianity of either the Roman 
or the Nestorian persuasion. The Roman Catholic archbishopric that 
was founded in a.d. 1294 by John of Montccorvino in the Mongol 
KhSqans’ southern capital at Khanbalyq (Peking), 1 on the inner side 
of the Great Wall, expired in the course of the fourteenth century 3 as 
obscurely as the Norse settlements in Grccnland.The prize of converting 
the last still pagan Eurasian Nomads was eventually divided between 
Islam and the Tantric Mahayanian Buddhism of Tibet, 4 and in the 
thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries Islam found other new 
worlds besides to conquer in Yunnan, the Deccan, Indonesia, the Sudan, 
Western Anatolia, and Rumelia. 

The event thus exposed the vanity of a thirteenth-century Western 
Christian dream that Islam might be stamped out by an enveloping 
centripetal reflux of the western and eastern arcs of a Christian wave 
which had previously been receding centrifugally in all directions under 
the pressure of a following Islamic wave’s advance. 3 The visionary 

1 See p. 356, above. 

* See Moule, A. C.: Christians in Chinabtfort the Year 1550 (London 1930, S.P.C.K.), 
p. 172 . For Qubiliy’s transfer of the Mongol imperial capital to Peking from Qaraqorum, 
see II. ii. 121. 

3 See Moule, op. cit., p. 107. The last archbishop of this see, which had been moved 
from Khanbalyq to Zaitun (Ch’Oan-chou, near Amoy), was murdered somewhere in 
Central Asia in a.d. 1362. _ _ * Sec pp. 218-19 and p. 337, n. 1, above. 

3 The succession of concentric waves in which Judaism, Christianity, and Islam spread 
over the face of the World, one after another, from an identical centre of dispersion in a 
'Greater Syria’ embracing Palestine and the Hijaz has been noticed in II. ii. 234-5 and 
285-8, and is depicted in xi, map 6. 



ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 361 
thirteenth-century Western observers who had dreamed this dream had 
not been mistaken in their intuition that, in the domain of Islam on 
which the Crusaders were trespassing, a mighty institution was passing 
away; their mistake had lain in identifying this moribund institution with 
the religion that had been revealed to Mankind through the Prophet 
Muhammad. The institution that was actually in extremis in the thirteenth 
century of the Christian Era was a Syriac Civilization whose disintegra¬ 
tion had been retarded by an intrusion of Hellenism and whose universal 
state, originally embodied in the Achacmcnian Empire, had been re¬ 
established by Muslim Arab empire-builders a thousand years after the 
destruction of the Achaemenian Empire by Alexander the Great. 

Islam might indeed have died out if it had never outgrown its original 
function of providing a distinctive heretical religious badge for Arab 
war-bands that had accidentally reconstituted a Syriac universal state in 
the shape of the Caliphate as a by-product of the barbarian successor- 
state that they had been bent on carving out of the Roman Empire. 1 It 
would in fact have died out if the Umayyads, like their Visigothic con¬ 
temporaries and victims, 1 had elected to abandon their distinctive bar¬ 
barian heresy in favour of their Christian subjects’ orthodoxy. In that 
event the ci-devant Muslim Umayyad Arab conquerors of Syria would 
have become converts to the Monophysite form of Christianity, like 
their predecessors the ci-devant pagan Ghassanid Arab wardens of the 
Roman Empire’s Syrian desert marches. 3 This possibility had passed 
away when the replacement of the Umayyad dynasty by the ‘Abbasids 
had transferred the ascendancy in the Caliphate from the Arabs to their 
Khurasan! clients and had substituted the profession of Islam for the 
possession of an Arab pedigree as the qualification for membership in 
a dominant minority. From that time onwards the spiritual gifts and 
intellectual abilities of all peoples in a politically reunited Syriac World 
had contributed to build Islam up into an oecumenical higher religion 
which could compete with Christianity on the strength of the elements 
that it had borrowed from it; and, in the next and last chapter of Syriac 
history, this enriched Islam had begun to make mass-conversions among 
a now' dissolving Caliphate’s Christian and Zoroastrian subjects, not 
only by virtue of its intrinsic spiritual merits, but for the sake of the 
enduring social order which Islam promised to provide for a world that 
was appalled at the prospect of losing the oecumenical framework which 
had hitherto been provided for it by the political institution of the 
Caliphate. 4 

The future of Islam had thus been assured before an already tottering 
Baghdadi ‘Abbasid Caliphate finally succumbed to a coup de grdee from 
the Mongols. So far from threatening Islam with destruction, the invasions 
of the Caliphate’s derelict domain by the Crusaders from one side and 
by the Mongols from the other were the finishing touches in the making 
of Islam’s fortune; for, when the Baghdadi ‘Abbasid Caliphate foundered, 
and all that was left of the old fabric of the Syriac Society went dow-n 
with it, Islam did not die, but lived on to offer refuge to the shipwrecked 

« See V. v. 127-8, 230, and 672-8. * See p. 280, n. 3, above. 

J See ibid. * See V. v. 678; VII. vii. 398-400; and xi, maps 38 and 39. 



362 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
children of a lost civilization. Islam not only captivated the savage 
Mongol conquerors of the Caliphate; she served as a chrysalis for 
bringing to birth two new societies to take the place of a Syriac Society 
that had finally dissolved in the post-‘Abbasid interregnum; and the 
emergence of the Iranic and Arabic Muslim civilizations set the seal on 
the discomfiture of the Western Christian Crusaders. 

In the first place these nascent societies, in the vigour of their early 
youth, created war machines with which the Crusaders could not com- 

K e. In another context 1 we have taken note of the overthrow of Saint 
uis’ disorderly knights by a trained and disciplined Egyptian Mamluk 
cavalry at Mansurah in a . d . 1250. 2 The still better trained and disci¬ 
plined Ottoman Janissary infantry, which overthrew the Mamluks in 
a . d . 1516-17, 3 had the upper hand over their Western Christian adver¬ 
saries from the fourteenth century to the seventeenth, when their military 
ascendancy was tardily wrested from them by Western troops who 
conquered them by at last successfully imitating them. 4 But sheer 
military superiority was not the whole explanation of the two new-born 
Islamic civilizations’ triumph over the West; for the Iranic Muslim 
Civilization, at any rate, gained the day by its superior attractiveness 
as much as by its superior strength. When, in the fourteenth and fifteenth 
centuries, Greek Orthodox Christians who could no longer look forward 
to remaining their own masters found themselves still free to choose 
between a Frankish and an Ottoman domination, they opted for the 
‘Osmanlis; 5 and a minority among them that was willing to contract out 
of an onerous political servitude by abandoning a traditional religious 
allegiance showed less repugnance towards becoming converts to Islam 
than towards staying within the Christian fold at the price of becoming 
ecclesiastical subjects of the Pope. While the Greeks’ historic choice was 
partly determined by the negative motive of resentment at the over¬ 
bearing behaviour by which tne Franks had made themselves odious in 
Greek eyes, some credit must also be given to the positive attraction 
exerted by the Ottoman way of life, in view of the significant fact that, 
in the golden age of Ottoman history, the Christian renegades who 
‘turned Turk’ were not exclusively Orthodox Christians who had found 
themselves caught between an Ottoman and a Frankish mill-stone, but 
were also recruited from among Western Christians who were not under 
any corresponding pressure to change their religious allegiance against 
their inclinations. 

In spite of the strength and attractiveness of the 'Osmanlis, the Franks 
might perhaps have retained permanent possession of at least a remnant 
of their acquisitions in the former domain of the East Roman Empire 
if the late Medieval Western cosmos of city-states, of which the North 
and Central Italian city-states were the foremost representatives, had 
succeeded in assimilating to itself the relatively backward feudal mass of 
a Medieval Western Christian body social. The Italians were condemned 
by an inexorable fiat of geography to live and move and have their being 
in the Mediterranean; they had invested heavily in commerce and 


1 Sec IV. iv. 431-65. 
1 Sec IV. iv. 450-2. 


J See IV. iv. 448-p. 

* See pp. 151-2, above. 


4 See III. iii. 31-47. 



ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 363 
sovereignty in the Levant; and, though they were at least as unpopular 
as the French, Catalan, and Navarrese Franks among Orthodox Christ¬ 
ians who could not avoid encountering them, they were at any rate more 
efficient than their Transalpine and Transmarine coreligionists—as was 
demonstrated by the accumulation in Venetian, Genoese, and Florentine 
hands of an ever increasing proportion of the constantly diminishing 
Frankish assets in the Levant in the course of the thirteenth, fourteenth, 
and fifteenth centuries.' 

If the Italian city-states had been backed by a Western World m 
which their own order of society had prevailed, they might perhaps have 
proved strong enough, with this solid support in their rear, to save the 
situation for Western Christendom on its Mediterranean front; but, as 
we have noticed in another context, 2 the ninth decade of the fourteenth 
century saw the end of any prospect that the Western World as a whole 
might find its way to modernization through a mass-conversion to the 
city-state dispensation which had made the fortunes of the precociously 
modern Italians and Flemings. In the event, the feudal mass of a Medieval 
Western Christendom modernized itself, not by reminting its kingdoms 
into city-states, but by adapting to the kingdom-state scale of political 
operations* the efficient administrative apparatus which late medieval 
North Italian despots had imported from the East Roman Empire via its 
Sicilian successor-state; 4 and the Modern Western World that was 
actually called into existence crystalized, not round the Mediterranean 
city-states of Italy, but round the Atlantic kingdoms and common¬ 
wealths of Portugal, Spain, France, England, and Holland. A Venice, 
Genoa, and Florence that had thus lost their lead within their native 
Western Christendom had, a fortiori, lost their chance of heading a 
united Western resistance to the progress of the ‘Osmanlis in the Levant, 
while the Atlantic countries that had won the lead and acquired the 
power were too eagerly preoccupied with the conquest of the Ocean to 
be willing to spend much energy on stemming the ‘Osmanlis’ advance 
in a Mediterranean that had dwindled into being a backwater. 

These considerations, between them, perhaps go some way towards 
accounting for the Crusaders’ eventual failure. Our findings may be 
summed up in the verdict that the Medieval Western Christian com¬ 
petitors for dominion over the Mediterranean Basin were neither strong 
enough to subdue their neighbours nor cultivated enough to captivate 
them. The second of these two judgements needs to be tested further by 
noticing what the Medieval Western Christians and their neighbours 
thought and felt about one another, and what, if any, cultural commerce 
was transacted between them. 

2. The Medieval West and the Syriac World 5 
When the Medieval Western Christians launched their assault on the 
Syriac World in the eleventh century of the Christian Era, they found 
its inhabitants divided in their communal allegiance between Islam and 
I See III. iii. 347, n. I, and pp. 168-70 and 177-8, above. 2 See III. iii. 347~5°* 

3 Sec III. iii. 300-1, 30c, and 357-63; IV. iv. 198-200; and p. 395, below. 

« Sec III. iii. 354-6; IV. iv. 198; Vfi. vii. 537-8; and p. 395, below, 
s Sec xi, map 41. 



364 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
the divers ecclesiastical communities that had occupied, between them, 
the stage of Syriac history before the Primitive Muslim Arabs had 
liquidated the Roman Empire south of the Taurus and had united 
politically under their own rule all Cis-Tauran Syriac territories, from 
the Pamirs to the Iberian Peninsula, that had been under Achaemcnian 
and Carthaginian sovereignty at the turn of the sixth and fifth centuries 
b.c. 1 The relations established by the Western Christian Crusaders with 
surviving pre-Muslim Syriac communities with which they came into 
contact were more intimate than their relations with their Muslim con¬ 
temporaries; and we may infer that the Crusades might have had longer 
abiding cultural effects of greater historical importance supposing that 
these Medieval Western wars of aggression had been waged in an earlier 
age in which the pre-Muslim communities had, all told, still embraced 
an overwhelming majority of the constituents of the Syriac Society. 

In the seventh century of the Christian Era—at the moment when 
the Primitive Muslim Arab conquerors had burst out of the Arabian 
Peninsula—Syria, Egypt, and Armenia had been predominantly Mono- 
physite, ‘Iraq predominantly Nestorian, the Iranian Plateau predomi¬ 
nantly Zoroastrian, the Oxus-Jaxartcs Basin predominantly Mahayanian 
Buddhist, and North-West Africa and the Iberian Peninsula predomi¬ 
nantly Western Catholic Christian, though some of these competing 
religious communities had been gaining ground at their neighbours’ 
expense. The Monophysites, for example, had not only reduced the 
Catholic Christians in Egypt and Syria to a mere minority of ‘Melchites’ 
who owed their survival there to the official support of the Roman 
Imperial Government, but had also been encroaching on the Nestorians’ 
domain east of the Khabur and the Euphrates, 3 while the Nestorians, 

1 The reintegration of a pre-AIexandrine Achaemenian Empire in a post-Roman Arab 
Caliphate has been noticed in I. i. 76 - 77 * 

* Between a.d. 457 and a.d. 486 a Nestorian Christianity which had been declared 
heretical by the Catholic Church at the Council of Ephesus in a.d. 431 succeeded in 
capturing the Christian Church in the Sasanian Empire (sec O’Leary, dc L.: How 
Greek Science Passed to the Arabs (London 1948, Kegan Paul), pp. 58-59), thanks to its 
enjoyment of two advantages. Its official proscription in the Roman Empire certified 
its political innocuousness from the standpoint of the Sasanian Imperial Government, 
while the community of language between the Syriac-speaking Nestorian Christian 
refugees from the Roman dominions in Mesopotamia and Syria and the Syriac-speaking 
population of the Sasanian dominions in 'Iriq gave the Nestorians an easy entry into 
this important mission-field. The same two advantages were, however, enjoyed by the 
Syriac-speaking Monophysites, in their turn, after their doctrine had been declared 
heretical at the Council of Calchedon in A.p. 451; and, in the seoucl, they, too, succeeded 
in forcing an entry’ into the Sasanian Empire at the Nestorians’ heels. Beth Arsham, on 
the threshold of the Nestorian Catholicos’a sec of Selcucia-on-Tigris, had a Mono- 
phyaitc bishop, Shc'mon, circa, a.d. 503-48 (O’Leary, op. cit., p. 88). Adiabene was won 
for Monophysitism by Ahudemmeh, who was Bishop of Takrir, circa a.d. 559-75 
(O'Leary, op. cit., pp. 90-91); and from a.d. 640 onwards the Monophysite Church in 
the ex-Sasanian dominions, then in process of being conquered by the Primitive Muslim 
Arabs, provided itself with a supreme pontiff entitled ‘maphrian’ (ibid., p. 91). On the 
other hand, when the Lakhmid Arab warden of the Sasanian Empire’s anti-Roman 
marches, Nu'man V, was converted from paganism to Christianity towards the close of 
the sixth century of the Christian Era, he adopted, not Monophysitism, but the Nes¬ 
torian faith of the Syriac-speaking sedentary population of his capital city, Hirah (ibid., 
pp. 67-68 and 184-5)* In making this choice, Nu'man may have been influenced by 
the consideration that the rival Ghassflnid wardens of the Roman Empire’s anti-Sasanian 
marches had opted for Monophysitism in a.d. J43, when the Ghassanid prince Harith 
b. Jabalah had obtained, through the offices of the Empress Theodora, the appointment 
of a Monophysite bishop to the see of Bostra (ibid., p. 86). 



ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 365 
for their part, had been gaining ground at the Zoroastrians’ expense on 
the Iranian Plateau, and the Zoroastrians at the Buddhists’ expense in 
the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin. 

The sudden and rapid conquest of these vast territories by the Primi¬ 
tive Muslim Arabs had not at first made any appreciable difference to 
the religious and cultural complexion of the Syriac World. Islam had 
appeared on the scene as the distinctive religion of a handful of bar¬ 
barian invaders; 1 and, even when an ‘Abbasid had been substituted 
for an Ummayad regime as a result of the overthrow of the Umayyad 
Dynasty’s Syrian Arab war-bands by Khur 5 sanl Iranian marchmen 
converts to Islam, the effect had been merely to replace one dominant 
minority by another. 2 A widespread conversion to Islam of the subject 
populations of the Caliphate, beyond the circle of the dominant minor¬ 
ity’s slaves, freedmen, and clients, apparently did not begin until after 
the ‘Abbasid Caliphate had been smitten in the reign of Mu'tasim 
(imperabat a.d. 833-42) by the first of the successive strokes that 
punctuated its long-drawn-out death-agony, and this propagation of 
Islam did not gather momentum until, in the eleventh century of 
the Christian Era, the ‘Abbasids’ derelict dominions were invaded 
simultaneously by Saljuq Turkish Eurasian Nomad barbarians over¬ 
land from the east and by Frankish barbarians overseas from Western 
Christendom. 

During a social interregnum in which the Syriac Society was in dis¬ 
solution while its daughter societies, the Arabic and Iranic Muslim 
civilizations, were still unborn, the non-Muslim populations that had 
been living since the seventh century of the Christian Era under an 
Islamic Caliphate’s political aegis were being drawn towards a spon¬ 
taneous conversion to Islam by a hope of finding in the solidarity of 
a common religious allegiance a social framework that would be more 
durable than the universal state whose once imposing structure was now 
falling about their ears, and at the same time they were being pushed 
forcibly along the same road by pressure—bursting out into increasingly 
frequent bouts of persecution—from a Muslim dominant minority that 
had been stung, by the humiliating and disquieting spectacle of bar¬ 
barians overrunning Dar-al-Islam, into abandoning the toleration that 
it had been accustomed to extend, not only to the scripturally accredited 
‘People of the Book’, but also by analogy to other cultivated non-Muslim 
communities such as the Zoroastrians, the Hindus, and even the HarrSnl 
devotees of an elsewhere extinct Hcllcno-Babylonic paganism. 3 In a 
crisis in which a Frankish and a Eurasian Nomad barbarian aggressor 
eventually all but joined hands in Syria for the purpose of dealing 


' Sec III. iii. 277; V. v. 230 and 676; and p. 10, n. 1, above, 
a See VI. vii. 140-1 and 329 . 

* For the customary Islamic liberality in extending to the adherents of all higher 
religions the toleration accorded in the Qur’Sn to ‘the People of the Book', see IV. iv. 
225-6 and V. v. 674, n. 2. For the fossil of the Babylonic Civilisation that survived at 
HarrSn down to the post-Syriac social interregnum, sec IV. iv. 101, n. 1; y. v. 125, 
n. 1; and Scton Lloyd: 'Recent Survey of Remains at Harran’, in The Times, 21st 
March, 1951, and 29th January, 1952. The part played by the Harranis in the self- 
Hellcniution of the Syriac World in the ‘Abbasid Age ts noticed in the present Study on 
p. 408, n. 5, below. 



366 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

Islam its death-blow, 1 Muslim public opinion became impatient of un¬ 
converted Unbelievers in the Muslim community’s midst. 

Owing to this conjunction of psychological and social circumstances, 
the Monophysite, Nestorian, and Zoroastrian communities in Dar-al- 
Islam suffered, in the course of some three centuries ending circa a.d. 
1275, the fate which had overtaken the ‘Melchite’ Catholic community 
in the Roman dominions south of the Taurus in the course of the two 
centuries between the convocation of the Council of Calchcdon in a.d. 
451 and the Arab conquest. In that earlier age of Syriac history a Catholic 
Christian community which had previously embraced almost the entire 
population of Syria and Egypt had dwindled into a minority as a result 
of a mass-secession to Monophysitism. Some four hundred years later 
the Monophysites and the other pre-Muslim ecclesiastical communities 
in the vast area that had been united politically in the meantime by the 
prowess of Muslim Arab conquerors were reduced in their turn, by 
mass-conversions to Islam, from being local majorities of the population 
of the now derelict domain of the Caliphate to being mere residual 
minorities like the ‘Melchites’. As for Buddhism in the Oxus-Jaxartcs 
Basin and Western Catholic Christianity in the Maghrib, they both 
disappeared altogether from regions which had once played a leading 
part in the lives of the Mahayana and of the Western Christian Church, 
and it may be conjectured that Western Christianity would have had the 
same fate in Andalusia as in the Maghrib if its extinction there had 
not been forestalled by the Western Christian transfrontier barbarians’ 
victory over the rival Muslim barbarians from the Sahara and the Atlas 
in their contest for possession of the spoils of the Andalusian Umayyad 
Caliphate; for, during the five centuries of Muslim ascendancy in the 
Peninsula, the backward native provincial Christians had shown them¬ 
selves highly susceptible to the attractions of their Arab Muslim masters’ 
superior Syriac culture. 1 

* Sec pp. 354-5. above. 

* In the Islamic community in Andalusia the descendants of native Iberian converts 
(muti'alladun) probably far outnumbered the descendants of Berber, and a fortiori those 
of Arab, immigrants. There were mass-conversions on the morrow of the conquest, and 
the Muslims of Saragossa and Toledo, in particular, appear to have been mostly of 
native origin (Livy-Provencal, E.: Hitloire de L'Espogne Musulmane . vol. i (Cairo 1944, 
Institut Francais d'Arch^ologie Orientate du Caire), pp. 53 and hi). There were even 
converts to Islam who came not from the subject population but from the independent 
Iberian Christian principalities. The Banu Qasi of Tudela, whose representative Musa 
b. MOs§ seized Barcelona in a.d. 856 (ibid., p. 220), were a converted Aragonese Gothic 
family (ibid., pp. 100-10) who had Basque kinsmen and allies (ibid., pp. 151-2), and the 
native origin of the family was proclaimed in the names of two of this Musa's four sons, 
Lope and Fortun, while the names of the other two, Mutarrif and Iamk'il, were tributes 
to the family’s conversion (ibid., p. 226). The rebel 'Abd-ar-RahmJn b. al-Jilliqi (‘the 
Galician’s son'), who ruled an independent principality at Badajoz, in defiance of 
Cordova, circa a.d. 875-930 (ibid., pp. 207-10 and 299), was manifestly likewise a 
Christian convert from beyond the border. The subject Christian origin of some of the 
leading Muslim families in Andalusia was similarly recorded in their family names: e.g 
th: Banu Angelino and Banu Sabarico of Seville, and the Banu’l-Longo, Banu Qabturus, 
and Ibn-al-Qutiyah (‘son of the Goth’) (ibid., p. 54). One of the rebels with whom 
'Abd-ar-RahmSn had to contend, Muhammad b. Ardabulish (ibid., p. 287), advertised 
in his father’s Sarmatian Christian name ‘Ardaburius’ his family’s descent from one of 
the pre-Visigothic Alan barbarian invaders of the Peninsula who must have stayed 
behind when the main body of his fellow tribesmen had crossed to Africa with their 
Vandal comrades. Though the Banu Hajjaj of Seville did not proclaim their Christian 
origin in their nomenclature, they are thought by Ldvy-Provenf&l (ibid., pp. 251-2) 


ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 367 
Thus, at the very time when the Western Christian Crusaders were 
establishing their ephemeral foothold on the Mediterranean fringes of 
the African and Asiatic domains of a moribund Syriac Society, the non- 
Muslim communities in the Syriac World were being confronted with 
a choice between conversion to Islam and persistent loyalty to their 
traditional religious allegiances at the enhanced price of an isolation and 
a persecution which they had not previously been called upon to endure. 
In these untoward circumstances the majority embraced Islam, and the 
prc-Islamic ecclesiastical communities of the Syriac World became 
almost extinct save for a few ‘fossils in fastnesses’: the Zoroastrians 
in the oases of Ya2d and Kirman; the Nestorian Christians in the 
highlands of the Zagros; the Syriac-speaking ‘Jacobite’ Monophysitc 
Christians in the highlands of the Tur'Abdln; the Armenian ‘Gregorian’ 
Monophysite Christians in the highlands between the Cappadocian 
Plateau and the lowlands of Cilicia and Commagcne; 1 the Maronite 
Monothelete Christians in the Lebanon; the Coptic Monophysite 
Christians in Upper Egypt, Nubia, and Abyssinia. Of these hardy 
survivors of a prc-Islamic age of Syriac history, only the Armenians and 
the Maronites came into direct contact with the Western Christian 
Crusaders, and both these communities were as strongly attracted by the 
Medieval Western Christian culture as the Medieval Western Christian 
subjects of a Muslim ‘ascendancy’ in Andalusia were attracted by the 
Syriac culture of their Arab conquerors. 

to have been descended from Goths who had taken sides with Tflriq b. Ziy&d in A.D. 
711. Abu 'Amir Al-Mansur’s second successor in the Cordovan dictatorship, ‘Abd-ar- 
RahmSn, was surnamed Sanchuelo (ibid., p. 469). 

The Iberian subjects of the Arab rulers of Cordova who did not adopt their masters’ 
religion were nevertheless apt, like the converts, to take Arab names. The Christian 
count of the Christian community at Cordova, who was entrusted bv the Umayyad 
amir Hakam I (imperabat a . d . 796-822) in a . d . 805 with the command of the slave corps 
and then in a . d . 818 with the collection of newly imposed taxes, was named Rabi' son 
of Tcodulfo (ibid., pp. 116-17). A Christian bishop, Rabi' b. Zayd, whose Christian 
name was Reccmundo, was employed by ‘Abd-ar-Rahmin III to obtain objels d'ari for 
him from Syria or Constantinople (ibid., p. 373) and was sent by him in a . d . 955 on an 
embassy to Otto I at Frankfort, where he met Bishop Liutprand of Cremona and per¬ 
suaded him to write his Antapodotis (ibid., p. 388). This adoption of Arab names was a 
symptom of the proclivity towards the Arab culture which won for the Andalusian 
Arabs’ Iberian Christian subjects the nickname musta'rib&n ('Arabizers'), as a synonym 
for mu' 5 hid 0 n or mu'AhadUn ('contractual clients'). 

The cultural bonds between Christian subjects and Muslim masters in Andalusia 
were linguistic. A vernacular Romance koini, which was spoken by ‘Abd-ar-Rahmin 
III (ibid., p. 285), is thought by L6vy-Proyen$al (ibid., p. 55) to have been the most 
widely current language among the Andalusian Muslims (compare the currency of the 
local Romaic Greek vernaculars among members of the Ottoman Muslim ascendancy 
in the Morca (see p. 683, below) and the Venetian ascendancy in the Ionian Islands (sec 
p. 170, above) in the early years of the nineteenth century of the Christian Era). 
Conversely, the musta'ribOn took pride and pleasure in talking Arabic, composing 
Arabic poetry, and producing versions of Arabic literary forms in the medium of their 
native Romance. 

The relation between the two communities was so intimate, and the atmosphere of 
toleration so strong, that there was at least one notorious case of counter-conversion to 
Christianity from Islam. The rebel 'Umar b. HafsOn and his wife turned Christian in 
a.d. 899 (ibid., p. 265), and their eldest son and their daughter Argcntea followed their 
example, while the three other sons remained Muslims (ibid., p. 293). After 'Umar’s 
last son had been compelled by 'Abd-ar-Rahman III to surrender the fortress of 
Bobastro on the 19th January, 928, Argentea went into a convent. She provoked martyr¬ 
dom on the 13th May, 937 (ibid., d. 296). 

1 Known, in the terminology of Assyrian political geography, as Tabal—'the High¬ 
lands’ par excellence. 



368 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

The Armenians who encountered the Crusaders after ensconcing 
themselves in the fastnesses of the Taurus and the Antitaurus in the 
eleventh century of the Christian Era were refugees from the North, like 
the Hittites who had found refuge in the same region in the twelfth 
century b.c. The invading ‘Sea Peoples’ and Phrygians, who in that 
age had overwhelmed a Hittite Power whose capital had crowned 
Boghazqal'eh in East Central Anatolia, had their counterparts in the 
eleventh century of the Christian Era in the East Roman Imperial 
Government and the Saljuq Turkish Eurasian Nomads. In its expansion 
at the expense of a disintegrating ‘Abbasid Caliphate the East Roman 
Empire illiberally and unwisely extinguished the recently won indepen¬ 
dence of the Caliphate’s Armenian successor-states in the highlands on 
the watershed between the basins of the Euphrates and the Aras, and 
thereby deprived itself of potential Armenian buffer-states against a 
Nomad invasion of Anatolia along the customary route up the Aras and 
down the Upper Euphrates’ northern branch (Turcick Frat Su, alias 
Qara Su). Gaghik II, the last king of Ani, the foremost of these Armenian 
principalities, was compelled by the East Roman Government to cede 
his dominions to them in a . d . 1045, 1 after Senekherim, the last king of 
Vaspurakan—the most easterly of the Armenian principalities and there¬ 
fore the most dangerously exposed of them all—had voluntarily ceded 
his dominions to the East Roman Emperor Basil II in a . d . 1021 under 
the menace of the onset of the Saljuq wave. 2 The East Romans were so 
far from being able to defend their newly acquired Armenian marches 
against their Saljuq assailants that they lost not only these but the heart 
of their ancestral dominions in Anatolia a3 well. After a spell of less 
than twenty years under East Roman rule, Ani was sacked by the Saljuqs 
in a . d . 1064; 3 and the crushing defeat which the East Romans suffered 
at Saljuq handsat Melazkerd in a . d . 1071 opened the way for the Saljuqs’ 
permanent conquest of Sivas, Qaysari, and QSniych and their temporary 
occupation of Nicaea almost within sight of the Sea of Marmara. 

This collapse of the East Roman Empire in Anatolia gave the 
Armenians an opportunity’ to compensate themselves for their lost 
homelands by carving out a new realm in a different quarter. The East 
Roman Government had unintentionally prepared the ground for this 
by planting Armenian wardens of the marches at strategic points com¬ 
manding the passes through the Taurus and the Amanus after the East 
Roman conquest of Cilicia and Antioch from the successors of the 
‘Abbasid Caliphate in and after a . d . 964/ and by assigning domains, 
inside the previous East Roman frontiers, to the Armenian kings whose 
dominions they had annexed in the eleventh century. Sivas had been 
assigned to Senekherim, the ex-king of Vaspurakan, in a.d. 1021, 5 and 
the army-corps district of Lykandos, in the mountains between Cappa¬ 
docia, Commagcne, and Cilicia, to Gaghik, the ex-king of Ani, in a . d . 
1045. 6 The Armenians’ bitterness against an East Roman Empire that 
had deprived them of their political independence in their homelands 

1 Sec de Morgan, J.: Histoire du Peuple Armimen (Paris 1919. Berger-Levrault), pp. 

_ s See dc Morgan, op. cit., p. 140. 

1 See de Morgan, op. cit., p. 156. * See ibid., pp. 162-3 and 165-6. 

* See ibid., p. 149. 6 See ibid., p. 152. 


I 



ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 369 
was aggravated by the ill-treatment to which they were subsequently 
subjected in exile on East Roman soil; they seized their first chance of 
shaking off a hated yoke; and the East Roman military disaster of a.d. 
1071 was followed in a.d. 1080 by the establishment of an independent 
Armenian principality in the mountains overhanging the Cilician Plain. 1 
In a.d. 1097, in the reign of Prince Constantine I {dominabatur a.d. 
1095-9), l ^ c son an( * successor of the founder, Rupen (dominabatur a.d. 
1080-95), these recently liberated Armenians in the Taurus fraternized 
with the warriors of the First Crusade during their passage through Cilicia 
to lay siege to Antioch; and this fraternization made the new-born 
Armenian principality’s fortune, besides being of substantial assistance 
to the Western Christian adventurers in the Levant. 

Refugee Armenians and errant Crusaders were, indeed, drawn 
together by the powerful bond of a common enmity towards both the 
Orthodox Christians and the Muslims, between whom the Crusaders 
and the Armenians both found themselves caught in a vice, and it was 
a godsend for either party to be able to join hands with the other. With 
the Crusaders’ help, Constantine’s successor Thoros I (dominabatur 
a.d. 1099-1129) was able to descend from his mountains and to conquer 
the fertile Cilician plain, and this conquest not only increased the 
Armenian principality’s strength but gave it a coastline which brought it 
into direct relations with a Western Christendom that had just wrested 
the ‘thalassocracy’ of the Mediterranean out of Maghrib! Muslim and 
East Roman Orthodox Christian hands. 2 The Armenians were willing 
converts to the contemporary Western Christian culture. Constantine I 
married his daughter to Count Jocelyn of Edessa and his niece (the 
daughter of his brother and successor Thoros) to Baldwin the brother of 
Godfrey of Bouillon. 3 Prince Leo II {dominabatur a . d . 1187-96) decided 
that the Cilician Armenian principality could no longer afford to remain 
in the comparative isolation to which it was still condemned by its lack 
of any legitimate political status and by the ecclesiastical gulf which 
insulated the Gregorian Monophysite Church from both the Eastern 
Orthodox and the Western Catholic Christian communion. Prince Leo 
determined to purchase his recognition as a legitimate king from one 
or other of these two preponderant Christendoms by paying the price of 
ecclesiastical union; and, after a half-hearted attempt at union with his 
unloved Orthodox Christian neighbours, he eventually achieved union 
with the more distant and less odious Latins. The terms were agreed 
between Prince Leo and the Vatican in a . d . 1196, and at Tarsus in a.d. 
1199 the Armenian prince was crowned king (regnabat a.d. 1199-1219 
as King Leo I) by a Uniatc Armenian catholicos in the presence of a 
representative of the Pope. 4 

This formal admission of a Cilician Armenia to membership in the 
body social and ecclesiastical of Western Christendom gave an impetus 
to the Westernization of King Leo’s realm. The Armenian Kingdom 
accepted the institutions of Western feudalism in adopting the Assizes of 
Antioch, and an educated minority of laymen, as well as the Uniate 

' Sec ibid., pp. 162 and x66. * See p. 3 S*. above. 

3 See de Morgan, op. cic., p. 169. * See ibid., pp. 187-93. 



370 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
clergy, became conversant with the Latin and French languages. In 
fact, the Cilician Kingdom of Armenia became an integral part of the 
Western Terre d’Outre Mer in the Levant, 1 and it was the last of the 
Continental Crusader principalities to succumb to an Islamic counter¬ 
attack. After the Egyptian Mamluks had deprived the Crusaders of their 
last continental bridgehead south-east of the Amanus by capturing Acre 
in a.d. 1291, Cilician Armenia continued to hold out for the best part of 
a century before it, too, lost its political independence through the 
Mamluks’ capture of its capital city, Sis, in a.d. 1375 from its last king, 
Leo V dc Lusignan ( regnabat a.d. 1374-5). 2 

After the fall of the Cilician Armenian kingdom, the local Armenian 
communities themselves survived in their highland fastnesses for 
another five centuries and more, under successive Mamluk, Dhu’lqadrI, 
and Ottoman regimes, till they were wiped out in the terrible deporta¬ 
tions of a.d. 1915; but the loss of their political independence had cut 
them off from their access to the sea and, in consequence, also from their 
contact with Western Christendom. By contrast, the Maronites, whose 
Lebanese fastness had been embraced in the domain of the Syrian 
Crusader principalities and who, like the Cilician Armenians, had 
entered into an ecclesiastical union with the Western Church, were able, 
thanks to their proximity to one of the shores of the Mediterranean, to 
keep in touch with the Western World throughout the five centuries 
that intervened between the fall of Acre in a.d. 1291 and the revival of 
Western interest in the Levant towards the close of the eighteenth 
century of the Christian Era. The Maronites’ earliest link with the 
Modern Western World was through France, who won over them in 
the nineteenth century a political influence which she forfeited in the 
twentieth century through an injudicious exercise of a mandatory 
authority over the Lebanon during the years a.d. 1920-44. The Maro¬ 
nites established a second link with the Modern West through the 
United States; and, at the time of writing, the French Catholic and 
American Protestant universities at Bayrut were living monuments of a 

1 This Francophiliam of the Armenian ‘displaced persona’ who had carved out for 
themaelve* a successor-state of the East Roman Empire in Cilicia was shared by con¬ 
temporary Armenian communities settled in territories then still under East Roman rule. 
In a . d . 1189. when Frederick Barbarossa was on the march, through East Roman terri¬ 
tory, from the Danube to the Dardanelles, the Armenians at Philippopolis and Prou- 
sinds fraternized with his army—in contrast to their Orthodox Christian neighbours, 
who evacuated their homes on the Western Crusaders’ approach (sec Nikitas Khoniatis, 
Khroniki Dhiiyisis (Bonn 1835, Weber), pp. 527 and 534); and, after the overthrow of 
the East Roman regime by the Western perpetrators of the so-called ‘Fourth Crusade’ 
in a . d . 1204, the Armenians of the Troad, like their Latin neighbours at Pighai (Bigha), 
invited the newly elected Latin Emperor, Baldwin of Flanders, to come over into 
Opsikion to help them, and raised some troops of horse to serve with him when he 
arrived (ibid., pp. 70 S -6 a °d 8t4; Villehardouin. Geofiroi de: Conqutte de Constanti¬ 
nople, chap. 69, § 3 to, third edition of N. de Wailly’s text and translation (Paris 1882, 
Didot), pp. 184 and 191). When the Crusaders found themselves compelled to evacuate 
their conquests on the Anatolian side of the Dardanelles, these Armenians emigrated 
with them en masse to the number of about twenty thousand, including the women and 
children, with their movable property loaded in wagons (Villehardouin, chap. 87, § 380, 
p. 226). They were all massacred by the local Greek population in Thrace (ibid., chap. 
* 7 , §385. P- 228). 

Nikita* Khoniitis notes (p. 527) several points of Christian ecclesiastical practice in 
which the Armenians took the same line as the Western Christians in common disagree¬ 
ment with the Eastern Orthodox Church. 

2 See de Morgan, op. cit., p. 235. 



ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 371 
mutual attraction between the Maronites and the Western World which 
had persisted since the Age of the Crusades without a break. 

The Crusaders’ relations with the Maronites of the Lebanon and the 
Armenians of Cilicia were manifestly more intimate than their relations 
with the Muslims who, during the period of the Crusades, became the 
majority instead of a minority in the population of a disintegrating 
Syriac World; yet, considering that Muslims and Christians ranked 
officially as ‘unbelievers’ in one anothers’ eyes, and that the champions 
of these two fanatically exclusive-minded Judaic religions were chroni¬ 
cally at war, we may marvel at the degree of the mutual respect which 
their fighting-men came to feel for one another, and at the amount and 
the importance of the cultural nourishment which a Medieval Western 
Christendom imbibed through a Syriac channel in which the spirit and 
technique of an Arabic poetry- were conveyed to them in a Romance 
language by Provencal troubadours, and the ideas of an Hellenic philo¬ 
sophy in the Arabic language by Muslim scholars. 

In the realm of the sword the sympathy between the warriors in the 
two opposing camps arose from the surprising discovery of an unexpected 
affinity. On the battlefields of Andalusia the Andalusian Muslims and 
the transfronticr Christian barbarians who were their coinhabitants of 
the Iberian Peninsula sometimes felt a closer kinship with one another 
than the Iberian Christians could feel with their coreligionists from 
beyond the Pyrenees, or the Iberian Muslims with their coreligionists 
from the Sahara and the Atlas, when they were each enjoying the doubt¬ 
ful blessing of being reinforced by these officially laudable but practically 
awkward allies. On the battlefields of Syria the Turkish barbarians who 
had become converts to Islam in the act of overrunning the dominions 
of the Caliphate were not unsympathetic adversaries for Western 
Christian knights who, in degree of civilization, were still not far above 
the level of their own barbarian predecessors who had become converts 
to Christianity in the act of overrunning the Roman Empire some six 
centuries earlier. In the Turkish ghazis the Crusaders were meeting 
their barbarian predecessors’ counterparts—and the Normans their own 
counterparts, considering that these ‘Hagarcnes’, who were the spear¬ 
head of the Frankish offensive in the Mediterranean in the eleventh and 
twelfth centuries, were as recent converts from Barbarism as the Saljuqs. 

In the realm of the pen the Crusaders’ temporary conquests in Syria, 
and still more their lasting conquests in Sicily and Andalusia, at the 
expense of Dar-al-Islam became so many transmitting stations through 
which the spiritual treasures in the storehouse of a moribund Syriac 
World were communicated to a Medieval Western Christendom . 1 The 

1 The successive stages in the process of transmission in Andalusia could be distin¬ 
guished in the surviving historical record. The first stage was the marriage of Christian 
princesses from the independent barbarian Christian principalities in the North-West 
of the Iberian Peninsula by Umayyad amirs and caliphs and by ‘Amirid dictators before 
the collapse of the Andalusian Muslim power in a.d. 1009. The second stage was the 
employment of transfrontier barbarian Christian mercenaries by Andalusian Muslim 
governments. The third stage—for which the second opened the way—was the conquest 
of Andalusia by the Peninsular barbarian Christian principalities. The fourth stage was 
the migration of musta'rib Christians from the still independent Andalusian Muslim 
principalities into the expanded Peninsular Christian Kingdoms. The fifth stage was the 



372 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
genial atmosphere of religious tolerance and intellectual curiosity, which 
temporarily captivated the Western Christian conquerors of Palermo 
and Toledo in virtue of its shining contrast to their own traditional 
fanaticism, was native to an Early Islam; 2 but the cultural treasures 

radiation of the musta'rib culture of the Andalusian Caliphate's Peninsular Christian 
successor-states into the Transpyrcnaean heart of Western Christendom. 

The Cordovan Umayyad Caliph 'Abd-ar-Rahmin III (nalus A.D. 891) had a Christian 
mother and grandmother (L<vy-Provenial, op. cit., p. 284), and his predecessor 'Abdal¬ 
lah (imperabat A.D. 888-0x2) may have owed his blondness to Christian maternal 
ancestresses (ibid., p. 231), though ' Abd-ar-RahmSn I, the founder of the Andalusian 
Umayyad line, must have owed his (ibid., p. 98) to his Nafzah Berber mother (ibid., p. 
67). The dictator Al-Mansur married Abarca, the daughter of Sancho Garc<s II of 
Na%-arre (who paid a state visit to his son-in-law at Cordova in A.D. 992), and also a 
daughter of Bermudo II of Ledn, who returned to Lc6n and took the veil after her 
Cordovan Muslim husband’s death (ibid., pp. 437-8). The Andalusian Muslim prac¬ 
tice of employing transfronticr Christian mercenaries can be traced at least as far back 
as the reign of the Umayyad amir Hakam I (imperabat a.d. 796-822), whose favourite 
guards were a band of 150 Narbonnese prisoners of war (ibid., p. 133). Al-Mansur 
(dominabatur a.d. 981-1002I substituted Christian and Maghrib! Berber Muslim mer¬ 
cenaries for the si* Andalusian Arab junds which had originated in vexUIaliones brought 
to Andalusia in a.d. 74 * by Balj b. Bishr al Qusayri (ibid., pp. 427 and 32-33) from the 
Arab junds cantoned along the desert coast of Syria and in Palestine and Egypt (see VI. 
vii. 130-1). The conquest of Andalusia (all save one fastness round Granada) by the 
Peninsular barbarian Christian principalities between a.d. 1085 arid a.d. 1248 exposed 
them to the radiation of the culture of their new Muslim subjects in the annexed terri¬ 
tories, and the transplantation of musta'rib Christians into the interior of the Andalusian 
Caliphate’s Christian successor-states carried the Andalusian culture, through the 
agency of these Arabizing Christian immigrants, into the North-West of the Peninsula, 
where the original Arab and Berber Muslim invaders had failed to maintain themselves. 
The Transpyrcnaean Frankish pilgrims to Compostela and volunteers in the armies of 
the Peninsular Christian conquerors of Andalusia played their part as carriers, in their 
turn, by importing a Peninsular musu 'rib culture into regions of Western Christendom, 
north of the Loire, to which the eighth-century Arab raiders had never penetrated. 

2 As witness—to cite one document from tnc file of evidence—the following testi¬ 
mony from a party of eighth-century English pilgrims to the Christian Holy Land. 

"At the time [of his arrival at Emcsa circa a.d. 723), Willibald had with him seven of 
his fellow-countrymen, making a party of eight, including Willibald himself. They had 
no sooner arrived than the heathen Saracens, finding that a party of unknown foreigners 
had made their appearance in the city, arrested them and kept them under detention, 
as they did not know their nationality and did suspect them of being spies. They brought 
them, under detention, before an elderly man of substance to be inspected by him and to 
have their provenance identified. This elderly man interrogated them—asking them 
where they came from and what was their business. They replied by giving him a cir¬ 
cumstantial account of the reason for their journey, going right back to the beginning; 
and to this the elder's reply was: “I have often seen people from those parts of the 
World—fellow-countrymen of these people—coming here; they intend no mischief; 
all that they want is to fulfil their law.” 

'Then they left the court and proceeded to Government House, to ask for a transit 
visa to Jerusalem, but they had no sooner presented themselves than the governor de¬ 
clared them to be spies and gave orders for them to be thrown into prison until he had 
had time to obtain instructions about their case from the King. After they had thus found 
themselves in prison, the marvellous dispensation of Almighty God—who, with His 
fatherly care, has everywhere deigned to cover his children with his shield and preserve 
them unharmed among missiles and engines of war, among savages and fighting-men, 
in prison and among hordes of miscreants—moved a man who was in business there to 
bestir himself, out of charity and for his soul’s salvation, to ransom them and secure their 
release from prison, in order that they might be free to go wherever they might wish. 
In this he was unsuccessful, but on the other hand he had luncheon and dinner sent in 
for them every day; and on Wednesdays and Saturdays he used to send his son to the 
prison to escort them to the public baths and return them to prison again, while on 
Sundays he used to take them to church through the bazaars, to give them the oppor¬ 
tunity of seeing anything that might take their fancy among the goods on sale there, and 
to give himself the opportunity of buving for them, out of his own pocket, whatever 
might suit their taste. The townspeople’s curiosity was aroused by the party to such a 
degree that they soon fell into the habit of coming there regularly to look at them (they 
were young and handsome and well dressed). 

'After that, while they were serving their time in prison, a man from Spain came and 



ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 3 73 
which, in this propitious environment, Western minds consented to 
receive from Muslim and Jewish hands during the next two hundred 
years were of Hellenic as well as Syriac origin. The Syriac Society was 
not the creator, but was merely the carrier, of authentic and apocryphal 
works of the Hellenic philosopher Aristotle which were made accessible 
to twelfth-century Western schoolmen by being translated into Latin out 
of Arabic versions in which they had been preserved thanks to the labours 
of Syriac scholars who had been assiduously translating the corpus of 
Hellenic philosophy, mathematics, physical science, and medicine into 
Syriac from the original Greek since the fourth century of the Christian 
Era 1 and into Arabic, both from the earlier Syriac versions and also 
from the original Greek, since the ninth century. 2 

In mathematics, astronomy, and medicine, in contrast to philosophy 
and terrestrial physical science, the Syriac-speaking Nestorian Christian 
pupils of the Hellenes and the Arabic-speaking Muslim pupils of these 
Nestorian Christians had not only preserved and mastered the achieve¬ 
ments of their Hellenic predecessors but had also taken lessons in an 
Indie school and had gone on to achieve original work of their own 
based on these Hellenic and Indie foundations. In these fields a Medieval 
Western Christendom took over from contemporary Muslim men of 

talked to them in the prison. He made detailed inquiries as to who they were and what 
their native country was ; and they gave him full and consecutive information about their 
journey. This Spaniard had a brother in the King's palace who was one of the King of 
the Saracens' chamberlains. So, when the governor who was consigning them to prison 
came to the palace, the Spaniard who had been talking to them in the prison, and the 
master-mariner in whose ship they had made their passage from Cyprus, presented 
themselves together before the King of the Saracens, whose title is Amir al-Muminin. 
After their case had come up for consideration, the Spaniard informed his brother of 
everything that the Englishmen had told him in the prison, and asked him to pass on 
the information to the King and to do what he could for them. Eventually all three of 
them together had an audience of the King and informed him seriatim of all the facts 
in the prisoners’ case. The King asked them what country they came from, and they 
said: "The West, where the Sun sets, is these people’s home, and we do not know of 
any country farther west than that or of anything but open sea in that direction’’. 
Addressing himself to the deputation, the King replied: "Why do we have to punish 
them ? They have committed no offence against us. Give them their visas and let them 
go." Other people under detention in prison had to pay a fee, but in their case this was 
remitted’ {Hodoeporicon Saneli Willibaldi, in Tobfer, T., and Molinier, A. fedd.]: 
Itinera Hierosolymitana et Dtscriptior.es Terrae Sanctae Beilis Sacris Anteriora et Latind 
Lingud Exarata (Geneva 1879^85. Fich, 2 yols.), vol. i, pp. 258-60). 

The spirit of tolerance that is illustrated in this narrative was imported by the Primi¬ 
tive Muslim Arabs from Syria into Andalusia. In A.D. 785, when ‘Abd-ar-Rahman I 
wanted to enlarge the Mosauc at Cordova, he did not confiscate, but bought, the half 
of the site that till then had been left to the Christians (L6vy-Proven$al, op. cit., p. 95). 
In the sixth decade of the ninth century of the Christian Era, when there was an outburst 
of fanatical fervour in the Christian community at Cordova, it proved as difficult to 
force the hand of the Umayyad authorities into bestowing the crown of martyrdom as it 
had been to force the Roman authorities’ hand in similar circumstances seven or six 
centuries earlier (L^vy-Proven^al, op. cit., pp. 159-67). There was a statue of the Virgin 
Mary over the Bridge Gate of the Umayyad city of Cordova (L6vy-Provencal, op. cit., 
p. 371), and a statue of a woman was even placed over the gate of ‘Abd-ar-Rahman Ill’s 
summer palace at Madinat-az-Zahrah, on which work was started on the 19th November, 
936. This second statue was removed in a.d. 1190—in an age of adversity in which a 
pristine tolerance was fighting a losing battle in Muslim hearts against rising feelings 
of resentment and apprehension (see pp. 365-6, above)—by order of the Muwahhid 
Berber ‘liberator’ of Andalusia, Ya’qub Al-Mansur (ibid.). 

1 See O’Leary, op.cit., p. 51, and p. ao 8 , n. 5, below. 

* See Swcetman, J. W.: Islam and Christian Theology, Part I, vol. i (London 1945 . 
Lutterworth Press), pp. 84-93 > O’Leary, op. cit., pp. r 55-75; and the present Study.p. 408, 
n. 5. The renaissance of an Hellenic philosophy and science in a Medieval Western 
Christendom through an Arabic medium is examined further in X. ix. 45-47, below. 



374 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

science the results of the Muslims’ own researches as well as the classical 
Hellenic body of knowledge which the Syriac Society had preserved in 
an Arabic dress and the system of mathematical notation which it had 
acquired in India ; 1 and, when we raise our eyes from the intellectual 
to the poetic plane, we shall see that, at this high level, the treasure that 
was acquired by a Medieval Western Christendom from the Andalusian 
Muslim representatives of a dying Syriac culture was a native Arab 
achievement which was to inspire all the subsequent achievements of a 
Western school of poetry down to the close of the Western Civilization’s 
Modern Age—if it is true that the ideas and ideals, as well as the versifi¬ 
cation and rhyming, of this Western school’s Provencal troubadour 
pioneers can be traced back to an Andalusian Muslim source . 2 

At the time of writing in the twentieth century of the Christian Era 
the body of mathematical, astronomical, and medical science which 
had proved so stimulating to Medieval Western minds when they had 
received it from the Muslim epigoni of the Ncstorian pupils of the 
Greeks had long since been superseded in the Western World by a series 
of original Western discoveries which had transformed Man’s vision of 
the Physical Universe, and a Western poetic tradition that had survived 
the transition from a Medieval to a Modern Age was being battered by 
the more violent break that the advent of a post-Modern Age had 
brought with it; yet, in the revolutionary dawn of this new chapter of 
Western history, the impact of a moribund Syriac Civilization on the 
youthfully impressionable imagination of a Medieval Western Christen¬ 
dom was still being proclaimed, with the silent eloquence of a visual 
testimony, in the realm of Architecture by ‘Gothic’ buildings which—in 
confutation of the misleading nickname that had been conferred on 
them by eighteenth-century Western antiquaries—bore on their face a 
patent certificate of the derivation of this Medieval Western style from 
models still extant in the ruins of Armenian churches at Ani and of 
Saljuq caravanserais on desert roads in Anatolia. 

In the twentieth century the cities of Western Europe were still 
dominated by ‘Gothic’ cathedrals which had superseded their Roman¬ 
esque predecessors as the result of a Medieval Western architectural 
revolution precipitated by the architectural impact of the Syriac World. 
But these medieval ‘Gothic’ ecclesiastical monuments of Syriac in¬ 
fluence in the European homeland of an expanding Modern Western 
World’s domain were not such impressive evidence—profoundly impres¬ 
sive though they were—as the modern Neo-Gothic ‘sky-scrapers’ 
which held their own on the sky-line of a twentieth-century New York 
against streamlined Towers of Babel, or as the Neo-Gothic halls and 
libraries and dormitories of contemporary American universities at 
Princeton, New Haven, and Chicago. An invading Syriac architecture’s 

1 The names of the Transoxanian poet-philosopher-theologian-physician Abu *AH b. 
Sinl {vivebat a.d. 980-1037) and the Andalusian philosopher Ibn Rushd {vivebat 
A.D. 1126-98) became household words in a Medieval Western Christendom in the out¬ 
landish distortions 'Avicenna’ and ‘Averroes’. 

1 The arguments for this derivation of the troubadours’ art arc set out by Christopher 
Dawson in an illuminating essay on 'The Origins of the Romantic Tradition' in his 
Mediaeval Religion (London 1934, Sheed and Ward), pp. 123-54. 



ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 3 7 S 
achievement of supplanting the Romanesque style on its native Western 
ground in the medieval chapter of Western history was assuredly sur¬ 
passed by the tour de force of its latter-day return to the charge in a 
Modern Western ‘Gothic Revival’ that was its successful revenge upon 
an ephemeral Modern Western Classical Renaissance. 1 

3. The Medieval West and Greek Orthodox Christendom 2 

While lesser Christian communities, such as the Lebanese Mono- 
theletes or the Cilician Armenian Monophysites, could reconcile them¬ 
selves, albeit with a pang, to union with one of the two principal 
surviving Christian Churches as an alternative to the still bleaker doom 
of extinction, the adherents of the Eastern Orthodox and the Western 
Catholic Church found it more difficult to come to terms with one 
another than with their Muslim neighbours. 

This discord between the Medieval Western Christians and their 
Eastern Orthodox Christian contemporaries was a consequence of the 
historical fact that the Hellenic Civilization had given birth to two 
daughter societies; for, on the morrow of their simultaneous emergence 
towards the close of the seventh century of the Christian Era, some five 
hundred years before the final breach between them in the tragic years 
a.d. 1182-1 204, 3 these two Hellenistic Christian civilizations had already 
begun to be alienated from one another by a diversity in Sthos and by 
a conflict of interests. In the course of the next five centuries the diver¬ 
sity in ethos was progressively accentuated by differences between the 
two sister societies’ respective experiences in successive chapters of 
their separate histories, while the conflict of interests came to a head in 
a competition for political and cultural predominance in South-Eastern 
Europe and Southern Italy. This struggle for power was embittered by 
the two competing societies’ rival claims each to be the sole legitimate 
heir of a Christian universal church, a Roman Empire, and an Hellenic 
Civilization which, in the last chapter of its history, had embodied itself 
in the Roman Empire as its universal state; for these competing ideolo¬ 
gical pretensions were ultimately irreconcilable. 

The political conflict was apt to be masked under the form of ecclesi¬ 
astical controversies in which questions of ritual practice and of ecclesi¬ 
astical jurisdiction and discipline played a more prominent part than 
questions of theological doctrine. 4 For example, when in the eighth 
century the Roman See took sides, in a quarrel in Eastern Orthodox 
Christendom over image-worship, against the iconoclastic policy of the 
East Roman Imperial Government, it was declaring, on behalf of the 
people of the Ducatus Romanus, the Exarchate of Ravenna, and other 

< For the archaistic revival of the ‘Gothic’ medieval style of architecture in the 
Modern West, see V. vi. 60. For the Modem Western Classical Renaissance in the realm 
of Architecture, see X. ix. 83-86. 2 See xi, maps 33, 34, 37, 38, 39 , 4 °, 4 «. 

1 The three atrocious acts that made the breach flagrant and irreparable were the 
massacre of Frankish residents in the East Roman Empire in a.d. 1182, the sack of 
Salonica by an avenging Norman expeditionary force in a.d. 1183, and the sack of Con¬ 
stantinople by a Franco-Venetian expeditionary’ force in a.d. 1204 ('the Fourth Crusade’). 

* In Eastern Orthodox Christendom 'popular interest veered from theological to 
liturgical issues ... as early as the sixth century’ (Every, G.: The Byzantine Patriarchate, 
451-1204 (London 1947, S.P.C.K.), p. 27). 



376 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
then still surviving fragments of the Roman Empire in Central Italy, a 
political decision to look beyond the Alps, to Austrasia, for a desperately 
needed military protection against their aggressive Lombard neighbours 
which they had failed to obtain from a Transadriatic Imperial Power at 
Constantinople. 1 When Pope Nicholas I refused in a.d. 862 to recognize 
Photius and went on in a.d. 863 to have him condemned by a Roman 
synod, 2 and when Photius retorted by having Nicholas condemned 
by a Constantinopolitan synod of a.d. 867, J the two prelates were 
playing ecclesiastical cards in a political game in which the stakes 
were the future allegiance of the hitherto pagan peoples of South- 
Eastern Europe between Adrianoplc and Vienna. 4 When, mid-way 
through the eleventh century, a movement for standardizing ritual 
usages in the domain of the Roman See, which had been initiated in 
a.d. 1045 by Pope Gregor)' Vi’s appointment of Hildebrand to be his 
capellanus , s collided with a corresponding movement inaugurated in 
the domain of the Oecumenical Patriarchate by Michael Cerularius 
after his accession to the throne of the Constantinopolitan See in a.d. 
1043, a liturgical conflict which caused the schism of a.d. 1054 was at 
the same time a political contest for the allegiance of ecclesiastical sub¬ 
jects of the Papacy in Southern Italy who were political subjects of the 
East Roman Empire. 6 

Though, in each of these three successive collisions, the ecclesiastical 
controversy masked a clash of political interests and was loaded with 
psychological charges of ideological animus and cultural antipathy, no 
one on either side on any of the three occasions seems to have been 
deliberately working for a breach. On the two first occasions of the 
three, the Papacy was tempted to exploit an opportunity for advancing 
its own interests which had been thrown in its way through its having 
been invited by one of two factions in Eastern Orthodox Christendom 
to intervene in a domestic quarrel within the bosom of the Eastern 
Orthodox Church ; 7 and on both occasions the ecclesiastical controversy 


pp. 


1 See Dvomi^V.: ^he~^hotian Schism (Cambridge 1048, University Press), 
93"98. > See ibid., pp. rao-r. 

4 See IV. iv. 379-81 and 605-10. * See IV. iv. 529 and 536. 

* See Runciman, S.: A History of the Crusades, vol. i (Cambridge 1951, University 
Press), p. 96, and the present Study, IV. iv. 6r2-i4- As Runciman puts it, 'the dispute 
was over usages; and it therefore raised the problem of the ecclesiastical frontier in 
Italy, a problem made more acute by the invasion of the Normans, themselves members 
of the Latin Church’. This was, however, only an incidental result of a policy of Gleich- 
schaltung which had been aimed by Cerularius, not at the Lombard Catholic Christians 
in Southern Italy, who had been allowed to continue to follow the Latin rite and to 
remain under the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the Roman See after they had come under 
the East Roman Empire’s rule at the turn of the ninth and tenth centuries (see IV. iv. 
343-4 and 6xo-t 1), but at the recently annexed Gregorian Monophysite Christians in 
Armenia. ‘His original motive was to absorb more easily the churches of the newly 
occupied Armenian provinces . . . But his policy affected also the Latin churches in 
Byzantine Italy and those that existed in Constantinople itself for the benefit of mer¬ 
chants, pilgrims, and soldiers of the Varangian Guard'(Runciman, op. cit., p. 96). 

i One of the most illuminating of the new lights in Uvornik’s The Photian Schism is 
his exposition of the importance of the part played in the collision of a . d . 862-80 be¬ 
tween Photius and the Roman See by a struggle between two factions within the Con¬ 
stantinopolitan Church. It was only human that the Roman See should have attempted 
to profit by the situation, but this was always a dangerous game for the Vatican to play 
in a Constantinopolitan ecclesiastical arena; for, though in domestic ecclesiastical con¬ 
troversies in the East Roman Empire it was an obvious recourse for a faction to appeal 



ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 377 
between East and West was eventually composed on the basis of a tacit 
compromise over the underlying political conflict. When the eighth- 
century controversy between the Constantinopolitan Patriarchate and 
the Roman See was settled by the Constantinopolitan Church's repudia¬ 
tions of Iconoclasm in a . d . 787 and a . d . 842, the East Roman Imperial 
Government was acquiescing in the loss of its political sovereignty over 
the Ducatus Romanus and the Exarchate of Ravenna, while the Roman 
See was acquiescing in the loss of its ecclesiastical sovereignty over the 
‘toe’ and ‘heel’ of Italy, as well as over Sicily and the Praetorian Prefec¬ 
ture of Illyricum. When the ninth-century controversy was settled in 
a . d . 879-80, the Constantinopolitan Patriarchate was acquiescing in the 
loss of its mission-field in Moravia, and the Roman Sec in the defeat of 
its hopes of acquiring jurisdiction over Bulgaria. 

The reconciliation between the Roman and the Constantinopolitan 
Church in a . d . 879-88 would become easier to understand if it should 
prove that, contrary to the traditional reading of the historical evidence, 
the Photian Synod of Constantinople in a.d. 867 did not, after all, either 
explicitly denounce the Western Church for having interpolated the 
filioque clause in the Creed 1 or explicitly deny the Roman See’s primacy 
over other patriarchal churches. 2 However that may be, there appears 
to be no doubt that in a.d. 1054 the ecclesiastical combatants on both 
sides exercised some self-restraint in refraining from aggravating a new 
breach by making theological denunciations against one another. The 
bull excommunicating the Oecumenical Patriarch Michael Cerularius 
and his advisers, which the departing Papal legates left on the altar of 
St. Sophia at Constantinople in that unhappy year, expressly admitted 
the orthodoxy of the Byzantine Church, 3 and the Constantinopolitan 
synod convened by Cerularius condemned, in its counterblast, the bull, 
the interpolation of the filioque clause in the creed, and the persecution of 
married clergy without expressly attaching to the Roman Church the 
responsibility for these offences. 4 In whatever ratios the responsibility 
for the breach in a.d. 1054 is to be apportioned between the Oecumeni¬ 
cal Patriarch and the three Papal legates, it is clear that it was deplored 
by a majority on both sides. Occurring, as it did, at a moment when the 
Vatican and the East Roman Government had a common political interest 
in checking the conquests of the Normans in Southern Italy at the 

to the Vatican when their opponent* had outmanreuvrcd them on the home front by 
securing the support of the East Roman Imperial Government, the warring Byzantine 
ecclesiastical factions were apt to close their ranks when their dissension manifestly 
threatened to jeopardize some vital East Roman interest. Ignatius, for example, who 
owed his reinstatement on the Patriarchal throne at Constantinople to the Roman Sec’s 
intervention on his behalf, proved as unwilling as his deposed rival Photius had been 
to resign Bulgaria to the Roman See’s jurisdiction (Dvornik, op. cit., pp. 151-8); and a 
reconciliation between Ignatians and Photians circa A.D. 876 (Dvornik, op. cit., pp. 169- 
71) prepared the way for the reconciliation in a.d. 879-80 between the Roman Sec and 
a Constantinopolitan Church that was now reunited under the presidcncyof a Photius 
who had been reinstated on the Patriarchal throne. Such experiences taught Eastern 
Orthodox Christendom that it* domestic dissensions were an aggressive-minded Roman 
See’s temptations and opportunities; and the feud between Photians and Ignatians, as 
well as the subsequent feud between Nicolilans and Euthymians (see IV. iv. 598-9), 
was solemnly consigned to oblivion at synods held in Constantinople in a.d. 920 and 
A.D. 991 (Dvornik, op. cit., p. 434). 

« See Dvornik, op. cit., pp. 122-3. 

3 See Runciman, op. cit., p, 97. 


2 See ibid., pp. 123-9. 
4 See ibid. 



378 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

expense of both these Powers, the ecclesiastical breach was deprecated 
by both of them for political reasons; and on both sides, for the next 
150 years, responsible churchmen did their best at least to prevent the 
breach from widening, in so far as they were unable to ignore its 
existence. 

‘The churches of Alexandria and Jerusalem had taken no part in the 
episode. The Patriarch of Antioch, Peter III, definitely thought that 
Cerularius had been unnecessarily difficult. His church had continued 
to commemorate the Pope’s name in its diptychs, and he saw no reason 
why that practice should cease .. . He could not support the standardiza¬ 
tion of ritual and usage; for his diocese contained churches where a Syrian 
liturgy was in use, and many of them lay beyond the political frontiers 
of the Empire. He could not have enforced uniformity there, even had he 
desired it. He kept himself outside of the quarrel.’ 1 

The nearest neighbour to Western Christendom among the Eastern 
Orthodox Churches that, in the eleventh century, were independent of 
the Patriarchate of Constantinople was the autonomous Archbishopric 
of Ochrida, 2 and at some date between a.d. 1090 and a.d. 1095, with an 
eye to the current negotiations on the eve of the First Crusade, the in¬ 
cumbent of this sec, Archbishop Theophylact, published a treatise mini¬ 
mizing the seriousness of the differences in ritual and theology between 
the Eastern Orthodox Churches and the Roman Church. 3 At the turn of 
the years a.d. 1097-8, when the Crusaders were threatened with famine 
under the walls of Antioch, the reigning Patriarch of Jerusalem, Symeon 
II, who had published a temperately worded treatise against the Latin 
rite, provisioned the Crusading Army from Cyprus, where he was a 
refugee; and this practical demonstration of goodwill was reciprocated 
in the policy followed by Adhemar, Bishop of Le Puy, Pope Urban II’s 
legate auprh the Crusaders. 4 After the capture of Antioch by the 
Crusaders on the 3rd June, 1098, ‘the Patriarch John was released from 
his prison and replaced on the patriarchal throne. John was a Greek, 
who disliked the Latin rite; but he was the legitimate patriarch of a sec 
still in full communion with Rome. Adhemar was certainly not going to 
offend against legitimacy and local sentiment by ignoring his rights.’ 5 
No doubt he would have gone on to reinstate Symeon on the patriarchal 
throne of Jerusalem if he and Symeon had lived to see the capture of 
Jerusalem in a.d. 1099. 

The spirit shown by the Papal legate 6 and the Patriarchs of Jerusalem 
and Antioch during the First Crusade was not confined to ecclesiastics. 

« Runciman, op. cit., p. 97 * . * Sec IV. iv. 394, n. 1. 

* See Every, op. cit., p. 177; Runciman, op. cit., p. 103. 

* See; Runciman, S.: ‘Adhemar of Le Puy and the Eastern Churches’, in Aetesdu VI' 
Congris International d'Etudes Byzantines, vol. i (Paris 1951). 

* Runciman: A History of the Crusades, vol. i, p. 237. 

6 Adhemar’s goodwill shines by contrast with the rancour shown, 130 years earlier, 
by Bishop Liutprand of Cremona, in his report to the West Roman Emperor Otto II 
on his diplomatic mission to Constantinople in a.d. 968-9. In discussing the meaning of 
a prophecy in the third-century- Christian Father Hippolytus's De Antichristo, Liut- 

S prand rejects with vigour the Byzantine interpretation, current in his day, that Hippo- 
js was foreshadowing an union sacrce of Eastern Orthodox and Western Catholic 
ristendom against Islam in Africa, and offers, as his own, the alternative interpre- 
wtion of a joint victory of Otto I and Otto II over Nikiphdros Phokis (Liutprand of 
Cremona: Relatio de Legatione Constantinopolitand, chaps. 40-41). 



ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 3 79 
The reigning East Roman Emperor Alexius I Comncnus, on whom the 
passage of the First Crusade through his dominions inflicted extreme 
political anxiety and personal discomfort, 1 is credited by his daughter 
the historian Anna Comnena with a scrupulous reluctance, even under 
severe provocation, to authorize his troops to shed their Western fellow 
Christians’ blood. The Emperor, as Anna presents him, is determined 
to avoid ‘civil war’ between the representatives of the two branches of 
the Christian community, 2 * and, when the clash becomes unavoidable, he 
instructs his archers to aim at the Franks’ horses in order to break their 
charge without taking Christian lives. 1 Later on, Alexius instructs the 
governor-general of Durazzo to cite the moral obligation deriving from 
a common Christianity as his ground for responding favourably to 
Bohcmond’s overtures for the restoration of a peace which Bohemond 
himself has treacherously broken. 4 Again, one of the motives attributed 
to Alexius by Anna for his policy of sending East Roman forces to convoy 
the Crusaders across Anatolia is a concern to save fellow Christians from 
being cut to pieces by the Turks. 5 Anna’s husband Nikiphdros Vryennios, 
whose Histories she continued after his death, records that his father-in- 
law, in his campaign, before his accession to the imperial throne, against 
the Norman military adventurer Russell, who was trying to carve a 
principality for himself out of the East Roman Empire’s Armeniac 
army-corps district, 6 took pains to capture Russell’s rebel Frankish 
troopers alive, because he had a scruple against killing enemies who were 
his fellow Christians. 7 

In the history of the Comnenian Dynasty’s relations with the Frankish 
trespassers on Orthodox Christian ground, the wry-faced forbearance 
practised by the Emperor Alexius I (imperabat a.d. 1081-m8) was to 
be transformed, in the attitude of his grandson and second successor the 
Emperor Manuel I (imperabat a.d. 1143-80), into a positive passion for 
Frankish comrades and customs; 8 and in the twelfth century, as in the 
eleventh, there were clerics on both sides, as well as secular statesmen 
on the East Roman side, who were concerned to avert a breach between 
the two Christendoms. Though at Antioch, under the rule of the Norman 
Bohemond, who was an implacable enemy of the East Roman Empire, 
the invading Latin clergy began, on the morrow of Bishop Adhemar’s 
death on the 1st August, 1098, to oust the Greek clergy from the diocese, 
and drove the reinstated Greek Patriarch John first into resigning and 
then into emigrating within two years of the Latin occupation, 9 the 
Latin successors of the Greek Patriarch of Jerusalem, Symcon II, 
justified their claim to be his legitimate heirs by their good treatment of 
Eastern Orthodox Christian residents and pilgrims in their patriarchate, 
and here, under this liberal dispensation, intercommunion between 
Latins and Eastern Orthodox seems to have been common in the twelfth 


I See pp. 390-2, below. 

» See Anna Comnena: Altxiad, edited by Rciffcracheid, A. (Leipzig 1884, Tcubncr, 

2 vol*.), Book X, chap. 0. * See ibid. 

* Sec Altxiad, Book XIII, chap. 9. s See Altxiad, Book XIV, chap. 2. 

6 See p. 357 , n. 3, above, and p. 389, n. x, below. 

’ See Vrycnnio*, N.: Historiae, cd. by Mcineke, A. (Bonn 1836, Weber), p. 85. 

* See pp. 392-3, below. ® See Every, op. cit., pp. 162-5. 



380 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
century. 1 Circa a.d. 1107-11, in a letter instructing the Benedictine 
community in Constantinople not to yield to the Oecumenical Patriarch’s 
exhortations to them to conform to the Eastern Orthodox rite, the Abbot 
of Monte Cassino, Bruno of Asti, qualified his insistence on the dis¬ 
tinction between the two rites by reminding his correspondents ‘that, 
although the customs of the churches are distinct, nevertheless there is 
one faith, indissolubly united to the head, that is Christ, and that He 
Himself is one and remains the same in His body’. 2 

In a.d. 1190, after the massacre of the Franks in the East Roman 
Empire in a.d. 1182 and the Norman sack of Salonica in a.d. 1185, the 
Eastern Orthodox titular Patriarch of Antioch, Theodore Balsamon, 
ruled, in answer to an inquiry from the Eastern Orthodox Patriarch of 
Alexandria, whose church had been accustomed to give communion 
to Latin prisoners-of-war held by the Muslim rulers of Egypt, that ‘no 
Latins should be communicated with unless they first declare that they 
will abstain from their doctrines and customs and be in subjection to the 
canons, and be made like unto the Orthodox'. 3 Yet, even after the sack 
of Constantinople in a.d. 1204 in ‘the Fourth Crusade’, the Metro¬ 
politan of Ochrida Dhimitrios Khomatinds (fungebatur a.d. 1207-22) 
noted 4 that Balsamon’s opinion was criticized by many Eastern Ortho¬ 
dox authorities ‘as showing too great harshness and bitterness, and an 
unjustifiable tone, in blaming the Latin forms and customs, ‘‘because all 
this”, they said, “has never been decreed synodically, nor have they ever 
been rejected as heretics, but both cat with us and pray with us’”. 

According to Runciman, 5 while the schism dates from a.d. iioo in 
the Church of Antioch, in the Church of Jerusalem it dates only from 
some time after (though not long after) a.d. 1187, and in the Church of 
Constantinople only from a.d. 1204, ‘when the Frankish conquerors 
appointed a Latin patriarch, ignoring the legitimate patriarch, John 
Camatcrus’. 

Why was it, then, that a breach between the two Christendoms, which 
had been staved off for the best part of five hundred years by the efforts 
of clerics and laymen of good will on both sides, came to pass, after all, 
in the years a.d. i 182-1204, and thereafter widened until in the fifteenth 
century the Eastern Orthodox Christians eventually opted for sub¬ 
mission to a Muslim Ottoman Padishah’s political dominion in prefer¬ 
ence to accepting a Western Christian Pope’s ecclesiastical supremacy ? 6 
In the last act of this tragedy the immediate stumbling-blocks were 

« See Every, op. cit., pp. 159-^2. First-hand evidence of this is to be found in the 
Russian Abbot Daniel’s description of the celebration of Easter at Jerusalem in a.d. 

«107 (see the English translation of hia narrative (London r 888, Palestine Pilgrims’ Text 
Society), pp. 74-S2). Daniel was allowed by King Baldwin (‘he knew me and liked me, 
being a man of great kindness and humility’) to place his lamp on the Holy Sepulchre, 
in the name of All Russia, to be kindled by the Holy Light. He was allowed to place it on 
the tomb itself, beside the lamp of the Greeks and the lamp of the Monastery of St. 
Sabbas, whereas the Franks’ lamps were merely suspended above and did not take light 
on this occasion. 

2 Mignc: Patrologia Latina, vol. clxvi, cols. 1085-90, cited by Every, op. cit., pp. 
167-8. 

J Migne: Patrologia Gratea, vol. cxxxviii, col. 967, cited by Every, op. cit., p. 165. 

* See Migne: Patrologia Graeca, vol. cxix, cols. 056-60, cited ibid. 

J ‘Adhcmar of Le Puy and the Eastern Churches', p. 331. 

6 Sec pp. 151-2, above. 



ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 381 
manifestly Western Christendom’s obstinate insistence on dictating 
terms of ecclesiastical union that stamped Eastern Orthodox Christen¬ 
dom as her inferior, and her no less persistent unwillingness to sweeten 
this bitter pill by guaranteeing to the East Roman Imperial Govern¬ 
ment, as a quid pro quo, that effective military aid would in fact be forth¬ 
coming from the West if the East Roman political authorities were 
unexpectedly to succeed in inducing their clergy and people to follow' 
their own heroic example in resigning themselves to the acceptance of 
such humiliating ecclesiastical conditions. The ultimate cause of the 
catastrophe is, however, perhaps to be found in a progressive divergence 
between the two cultures, in points of ethos and way of life, which had 
begun to show itself seven hundred, or even a thousand, years earlier, 
and which is illustrated on the ecclesiastical plane by the differentiation 
between the Greek and Latin rites; for this diversity stimulated an anti¬ 
pathy that increased pari passu with it. An aggravating circumstance 
was the sudden, unexpected, and sensational reversal of the tw'o sister 
Christian societies’ relative strengths and prospects in the eleventh 
century. 1 

One of the consequences of this political and economic peripeteia 
was that, from that time onwards, either party presented an insufferable 
appearance in the other party’s eyes. In the sight of the Eastern Ortho¬ 
dox Christians the Franks were now parvenus who were cynically exploit¬ 
ing a superiority in brute force which had been undeservedly conferred 
upon them by a preposterous latter-day freak of Fortune. In the sight 
of the Western Christians the Byzantines were now mandarins w'hose 
overweening pretensions were neither justified by merit nor backed by 
force. To the Franks it seemed as monstrous that the Byzantines should 
expect them to feel honoured at being given the opportunity of pulling 
Greek chestnuts out of a Turkish fire as it seemed monstrous to the 
Byzantines that the Franks should take advantage of the exhaustion of 
an East Roman Empire which had spent its strength in bearing the brunt 
of a battle in a common cause against a Muslim aggressor who was a 
menace to Eastern and Western Christendom alike. 

From the Eastern Orthodox Christian standpoint the eleventh-century 
reversal of the relation between the two Christendoms was an inexcu¬ 
sable practical joke which a Byzantine pedant's literary conceit might 
debit euphemistically to Clio, the pagan Hellenic Muse of History, as 
an ingenious way out of the blasphemy of ascribing to the presumably 
Orthodox God of Constantine and Justinian and Basil the Bulgar- 
Slayer a gaffe which was not only supremely unjust but was also in 
excruciatingly bad taste. In the preceding age the spectacle of a Western 
Christendom wallowing in a poverty and an impotence which were the 
wages of a sinful inclination towards Barbarism had been not unplcasing 
for a Byzantine statesman or scholar to contemplate. The contrast be¬ 
tween his Latin poor relation’s misery and his own comparative state of 
blessedness in This Life had given him the same sense of satisfaction 
and self-assurance that either breed of Christian would have felt in that 
epoch when he imagined himself in the Life to Come leaning over the 
* Sec pp. 351-2, above. 



382 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
balustrade of Heaven and feasting his eyes on the tortures of damned 
personal acquaintances in Hell. 

As an early-eleventh-century Byzantine student of history might have 
seen it, his Latin contemporaries were then justly still being punished 
for the sins of forefathers who, in the fifth century of the Christian Era, 
had committed the moral and aesthetic solecism of parting company 
with their fellow Orthodox Christians and fellow Roman citizens in 
the Greek-speaking core of an Hellenic World embodied in the Roman 
Empire, in order to fraternize with North European barbarians by 
whom the Latin-speaking western fringes of the Roman Empire were 
being overrun. From the Byzantine point of view the fifth-century 
breakdown in those Latin-speaking provinces had revealed culpable 
incompetence in so far as it had been involuntary, as well as cul¬ 
pable disloyalty in so far as it had been the expression of a preference 
for chastisement by barbarian warlords’ whips to chastisement by im¬ 
perial tax-collectors’ scorpions. Yet, in the sequel, the tribulation which 
the Latin secessionists from Civilization had brought upon themselves— 
and had duly continued to bring upon themselves in the ludicrously 
disastrous aftermath of Charlemagne’s naively presumptous usurpation 
of the Roman Imperial Crown—was a punishment that had gratifyingly 
fitted their crime, while on the other hand their secession, offensive 
though it might be, had not inflicted any appreciable material damage 
upon the intact Greek core of Romania and Christendom. Indeed, if the 
implicit offence to Byzantium's amour propre and the impalpable damage 
to her prestige could legitimately be discounted, she might consider 
that she was positively the gainer in being relieved of responsibility for 
a backward Latin fringe that had never been more than an excrescence 
on the body social of the Hellenic Society and had latterly become not 
merely an excrescence but an incubus. 

This imaginary early-eleventh-century Byzantine appreciation of the 
relations between Eastern Orthodox Christendom and the West up to 
date would have required a painfully drastic revision before the century 
was over. A comfortable attitude of meritorious and unchallengeable 
superiority could now no longer plausibly be maintained towards once 
poor relations who, overnight, had become nouveaux riches', and the 
worst of it was that, all along, these Latin barbarians beyond the 
Byzantine earthly paradise’s pale had been in possession of one ecclesias¬ 
tical and cultural asset whose supreme value the East Romans could not 
dispute without impugning the title on which they based their own claim 
to be the exclusive Heirs of the Promise of Hellenism and Christianity. 

The Old Rome on the banks of the Tiber might be held to have 
forfeited her political primacy to a New Rome, set on the shores of a 
mightier stream, whose geographically manifest destiny to become the 
capital of the World had been fulfilled by the historic act, and conse¬ 
crated by the immense authority, of the first Christian Roman Emperor. 
Yet neither Constantine’s august genius nor Poseidon’s masterly creation 
of the Bosphorus by a god’s mighty trident-stroke 1 could undo the 
historic fact that the site of the Old Rome, however woefully devastated 

1 See II. i. 325-6. 



ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 383 
it might be in terms of human power and pride, 1 was eternally hallowed 
by the presence of the mortal remains of the two arch-apostles, Peter and 
Paul, who had come to Rome to be martyred there owing to the accident 
that this dcmi-Hcllenic Central Italian town happened to be the political 
capital of the World in the Apostles day. 2 The numinous mana of a Rome 
that was the sepulchre of Peter and Paul had retained all the potency 
bequeathed by this second pair of discordant founders when the volatile 
political power of the pagan Rome of Romulus and Remus had ebbed 
away to Nicomedia and Constantinople and Milan and Ravenna and 
Trier and Aachen. On the political plane a medieval Rome had been 
degraded from being caput mundi to becoming a derelict frontier-post 
on the borderline between two rival Christendoms; but in the course of 
the eighth century of the Christian Era this ruin that had become a poli¬ 
tical liability had passed out of East Roman into Frankish hands, and in 
consequence the earthly representative of the Prince of the Apostles had 
become the President of a Western Christian commonwealth instead of 
remaining an East Roman subject. The Eastern Patriarchates might 
wince at being required to recognize the Papacy’s supremacy, but it was 
difficult for them to deny that the Pope was at any rate primus inter pares 
in the light of the Papacy’s indisputably decisive role in determining the 
acts of oecumenical councils, culminating in the Council of Calchedon, 
whose findings were the foundations of Eastern Orthodox, as well as 
Western Catholic, theology. 

Nor. was the Papacy’s eminence merely an echo of ancient history; it 
was also a portentous living fact, as the East Roman Imperial Govern¬ 
ment had discovered through a costly experiment on the occasion of the 
controversy over images in the eighth century. The Vatican had then 
proved no longer amenable to the harsh political discipline which the 
Emperor Justinian I had applied to Popes Silverius and Vigilius and the 
Emperor Constans II to Pope Martin I, 3 and thereafter the East Roman 
Imperial Government showed its flair for political realities by steadily 
insisting, sometimes in the teeth of opposition on the part of at least one 
faction in the Eastern Orthodox Church, upon treating the Papacy- with 
the tactful consideration which it was only politic to show to a Great 
Power. 4 The East Roman Government constantly pursued this concilia¬ 
tory policy towards the Vatican from the time of the conflict between 
Pope Nicholas I and the Oecumenical Patriarch Photius ( flagrabat a.d. 
862 5 -8o 6 ) down to the capture of Constantinople by the ‘Osmanlis in 
a.d. 1453 ; 7 but, though the policy was never abandoned, the fateful 

1 See the passage quoted from a sermon of Gregory the Great's in IV. iv. 60-61 and 
VII. vii. 553. 

* ‘Non cst a Graecis Romanua vilis tenendus locus quia recessit indc imperator Con- 
stantinus, verum co magis colendus, venerandus, ndorandus quia vencrunt illuc Apo- 
stoli, doctores sancti, Petrus et Paulus’ (Liutprand of Cremona: Relatio de Lcgattone 
Conslanlinopolitartd, chip. Ixii). 

J Sec IV. iv. 337. The East Roman Government ought to have taken warning from 
the failure of its attempt in A.D. 693 to deal with Pope Sergius I as it had dealt with 
Pope Martin I in a.d. 653. 4 Sec IV. iv. 604-16. 

* See Dvomik, F.: The Photian Schism (Cambridge 1048, University Press), pp. 

94-95. 6 Sec ibid., chap. 6, pp. 159-201. 

’ No particularly remarkable statesmanship was required to inspire the eleventh-hour 
attempts of the later Palaiol6ghi to come to terms with the Vatican at the price of 



384 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
breach between the Oecumenical Patriarch and the Vatican in a . d . 1054 
marked the beginning of the end of its effectiveness. Down to that date 
the East Roman Imperial Government had usually proved strong enough 
to impose its philopapal will on an antipapal faction in the Eastern 
Orthodox Church; from Cerularius’s day onwards this faction in the 
Eastern Orthodox Church usually proved strong enough, when it chose, 
to repudiate and thereby nullify successive ententes between the East 
Roman Imperial Government and the Papacy. 1 

The more and more fanatically intransigent opposition to an ecclesias¬ 
tical reunion with Rome which was displayed by the clergy and people 
of Eastern Orthodox Christendom after the final breach in a . d . 1182- 
1204 was the effect, not only of a reversal of fortune, but also of an 
increasing cultural antipathy which was reciprocated by a contempor¬ 
aneous increase in the corresponding hostile feelings on the Western 
Christian side. In Byzantine eyes the Franks were impertinent, un¬ 
mannerly, and truculent; in Frankish eyes the Byzantines were preten¬ 
tious, pedantic, and perfidious. Out of the copious medieval Greek and 
Latin literature illustrating the Franks’ and Byzantines’ unedifying 
mutual dislike and hostility, we must be content in this place to cite 
a few illuminating passages from one representative spokesman on 
either side. As evidence of the Franks’ prejudice against the Byzantines 
we may quote a report 2 by the Lombard bishop Liutprand of Cremona 
(vivebat circa a . d . 920-72) on a diplomatic mission to the East Roman 
Imperial Court at Constantinople which he had carried out on behalf of 
his Saxon master the West Roman Emperor Otto II in a.d. 968-9, when 
the East Roman Empire was at its zenith. 3 As evidence of the Byzantine 

acknowledging the ecclesiastical supremacy of the Papacy over the Eastern Orthodox 
Churches. The breach of all diplomatic precedent that was committed by the Emperor 
John Palaioldghos I in a.d. 1369, when he paid a personal visit to Pope Urban V at Rome 
as a suppliant, was prompted by the no less unprecedented change for the worse in the 
military and political situation of a precariously restored East Roman Empire since the 
reduction of Constantinople to an enclave, entirely surrounded by Ottoman territory, 
as a result of Sultan Mur 3 d I’a conquest of Adnanoplc in a.d. rj6r. The Emperor 
Manuel Palaioldghos’s visic to the Courts of France and England in a . d . 1400-2 was 
similarly prompted by the permanent blockade to which Constantinople had been sub 
jeeted by Sultan Biyezid I since a.d. 1391, and the Emperor John Palaioldghos Il's 
visit to Italy in a.d. 1437-p, which bore fruit in the negotiation of the ecclesiastical Union 
of Florence, by a lively fear of a repetition of the abortive siege of Constantinople by 
Sultan Murid II in A.D. 1412. On the other hand, when the founder of the dynasty, the 
Emperor Michael Palaioldghos, had negotiated the first of the scries of ecclesiastical 
unions in a.d. 1274 (see IV. iv. 615-16), the antecedent event that had prompted him 
had not been a disaster, but had been the brilliant success of his capture of Constanti¬ 
nople from the last of the usurping Latin emperors in a.d. 1261. Michael's concern was, 
not to retrieve a misfortune, but to forestall a revanche, and, in taking so momentous a 
step before being forced to take it by accomplished facts, he was showing vision as well 
as courage of the highest order. 

« For the change in the Balance of Power between the East Roman Imperial Govern¬ 
ment and the Orthodox Church, to the Church’s advantage, in and after the eleventh 
century of the Christian Era, see IV. iv. 6x2-23. 

1 Liutprandi Rtlatio de Legation Constantinopoiitand. 

3 This was not Liutprand's only excursion on to Orthodox Christian ground. One 
of his earliest undertakings as a young man had been a mission to Constantinople in 
A.D. 940 ( imperante Constantino VII Porphyrogenito ) on behalf of the North Italian 
prince Berengar of Ivrea (Liutprandi Opera, edited by Becker, J.: 3rd cd. (Hanover 
and Leipzig 1915, Hahn), p. viri), and he may also have been a member of the mission 
sent to Constantinople by Otto II in A.D. 971, (ibid., p. xii). A brief and, on the whole, 
courteous account of the mission of a.d. 949 is given by Liutprand in his history of his 
own times ( Antapodosis , Book VI, chaps. 3-10). 



ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 385 
prejudice against the Franks, we may quote the Greek princess- 
historian Anna Comnena’s history of the reign of her father the East 
Roman Emperor Alexius I (imperabat a.d. 1081-11x8), who became 
disagreeably well acquainted with the Franks through having to cope 
first with the Normans’ attempt to conquer the East Roman Empire in 
the war of a.d. 1081-5 an< ^ then with the Crusaders’ transit across his 
dominions in a.d. 1096-7—a visitation which caused the Emperor more 
anxiety than the Normans’ previous undisguised aggression, since the 
foiled but impenitent Norman aggressors were now claiming rcadmit- 
tance, in the company of a host of adventurers recruited from other 
Western Christian barbarian tribes, in the novel and unconvincing guise 
of the East Romans’ allies and champions. 

Bishop Liutprand’s official anxieties and adversities in the difficult 
diplomatic task with which he had been entrusted were aggravated by 
his personal disgust with all the incidental details of daily life in the 
Orthodox Christendom of his day. The palace assigned to him was so 
inconsiderately exposed to the elements that it was always either too 
hot or too cold. 1 What hateful quarters! 2 And they were so far from the 
Emperor’s palace—to which he was made to walk, and was not allowed 
to ride—that he always arrived out of breath. 3 In these odious apart¬ 
ments the Ambassador and his suite were kept insulated by security 
police. 4 Even his Greek-speaking dragoman was not allowed out to buy 
provisions, and he had to send to market a cook who knew no Greek and 
who was shamelessly cheated over the purchases which he was forced to 
make by dumb-show. 5 The pitch and gypsum with which the Greek 
wine provided for him was doctored made it undrinkable, 6 and drinking- 
water could not be had except for cash. 7 As for the food, it was as horrid 
as the wine and as scarce and expensive 8 as the water. The Lombard 
bishop could not stomach the highly seasoned fare that was served to 
him at the East Roman imperial table; 6 but he also disdained the plain 
Greek biscuit ( paximadhi) which was all that the poverty-stricken 
eunuch-bishop of Lefkddha had to offer him 10 (‘in the whole of Greece’, 
Liutprand declares, ‘I have not found one single hospitable bishop’)." 
In the hateful quarters in the capital the officer responsible for providing 
Liutprand and his party with their daily subsistence allowance was a 
devil. 12 The beds, too, were stone-hard, without mattress or pillow." The 
Emperor’s procession to celebrate the opening of a new regnal year was 
tawdry. 14 In short, everyone of the Ambassador’s 120 days 15 in the New 
Rome was a torment; 16 and, after taking a school-boy’s revenge on his 
hosts by scrawling a screed of abusive Latin hexameters on the walls and 
table, 17 he rejoiced to see the last of 'that once opulent and flourishing 
but now famine-stricken, perjured, lying, deceitful, rapacious, covetous, 
miserly, empty-headed city’ 18 —only to suffer a further martyrdom on a 

1 Legatio, chap. x. 1 Ibid., chaps. 13. 19, and 24. * Chap. x. 

* Chaps, x, 26, and 29. » Chap. 46. 6 Chaps, x and 13. 

~ Chap. x. * Chaps. 34 and 44. « Chaps. 20 and 32. 

10 Chap. 63. 11 Ibid. 12 Chap. 1. «» Chap. 13. 

** Chaps. 9-10. ** 4th June to 2nd October, A.D. 968. 

> 6 Chaps. 1 and 46. 17 Chap. 57. 

14 Chap. 58. 

B 2898 .VUI 


O 



3 86 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
seven-weeks’ journey 1 overland from Constantinople to Lepanto 2 in 
which he had to pay an exorbitant price to his courier (dhiasostis) for 
the hire of pack-horses which the Imperial Government had omitted 
to provide. 3 

Equally exasperating—and this to both parties—were the chronic dis¬ 
putes over childish points of protocol which exacerbated Byzantino- 
Frankish relations for centuries. Liutprand was indignant with the 
Emperor Nikiphdros’s brother, the Kouropalitis and Grand Logothete 
Leo, for referring to Liutprand’s own master, Otto, not as ‘emperor’ 
(BaaiXtvs) but as ‘king’ (pfjt),* while Nikiphoros spoke with displeasure 
of Otto’s ‘intolerable, unmentionable’ presumption in styling himself 
‘emperor’. s The East Roman Imperial Court was still more incensed 
when a mission arrived from the Pope of the day 6 bearing a letter 
addressed to ‘the Emperor of the Greeks’. 7 Questions of precedence 
proved as painful as questions of style and title. After having been 
seated fifteen places away from the Emperor at one banquet, 8 Liutprand 
left the room when, at another banquet, he found himself placed below 
a Bulgar envoy ‘with his head cropped like a Hungarian and a brass 
chain doing duty for a belt’. Kouropaldtis Leo and First Secretary 
Simeon ran after the retreating Ambassador shouting at him that the 
Bulgarian envoy enjoyed precedence over all other foreign ambassadors 
by treaty' right, and that the present envoy, in spite of his cropped head, 
unwashed body, and brass chain, was nevertheless a patrician and must 
therefore take precedence over a bishop—particularly over a bishop who 
was also a Frank. They would not allow Liutprand to come back, but 
dismissed him to take his dinner in the servants’ hall; 5 and another 
time, on a hunting party, they dismissed him from the imperial park for 
his breach of etiquette in wearing a cap instead of a hat in the Emperor’s 
presence. 10 Before the ambassador’s departure from Constantinople, the 
imperial authorities gave him a further lesson in the low esteem in which 
they held the Franks by compulsorily repurchasing from him five purple 
robes of state which Liutprand had bought during his stay in Constanti¬ 
nople but which the authorities now declared to be of the category 
scheduled as ‘too good for export’ ( KOi\v 6 p(va )." 

Liutprand’s conversations with the Emperor Nikiphoros and his 
ministers were enlivened on both sides by sallies that were occasionally 
pointed but more often merely vituperative. 12 Liutprand’s own most 
telling shot was that ‘it was the Greeks who bred heresies, and the 
Westerners who killed them; MJ and at a state banquet on the 7th June, 
968, the inflammatory word ‘Romans’ kindled into flame the perpetually 


’ 2nd October to 20th November, a.d. 968. * Chap. 58. 

1 Chap. 57. 4 Chap. 2. s Chap. 25. 6 Chaps. 47 and 50. 

1 Chap. 47. When the East Roman officials took Liutprand to task over this, he 

£ ye them, according to his own account, the following malicious explanation: ‘The 
pc, in his noble simplicity, was intending to pay the Emperor a compliment, ar.d not 
to insult him, by giving him this title. We are well aware that Constantine the Emperor 
of the Romans came here with the Roman Army and founded this city that is named after 
him; but, since you have changed your language, your manners and customs, and your 
dress, His Holiness inferred that you disliked being called Romans as much as you dis¬ 
liked wearing Roman clothes’ (chap. 51). 

8 Chap. ix. • Chap. 19. 10 Chap. 37. » Chaps. 53-55. 

12 See, for example, chaps. 37, 45, and 53. u Chap. 22. 



ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 387 
smouldering resentment between the representatives of the two 
Christendoms. 

‘Nikiphdros refused to give me a chance of replying to him, and added 
insultingly: “You are not Romans; you are Lombards!” He wanted to 
go on, and motioned to me to be silent, but I lost my temper and took the 
floor. “It is a notorious historical fact,” I declared, “that Romulus, after 
whom the Romans arc called, was a fratricide and a son of a whore— 
born, I mean, out of lawful wedlock—and that he set up an Alsatia for 
defaulting debtors, fugitive slaves, murderers, and perpetrators of other 
capital offences. He harboured these criminals, collected a crowd of them, 
and called them “Romans”. This is the fine aristocracy from which your 
emperors, or KoanoKparopts as you call them, arc descended. But we— 
and by "us” I mean us Lombards, Saxons, Frenchmen, Lorrainers, Bava¬ 
rians, Swabians, Burgundians—we despise the Romans so utterly that, 
when we lose our tempers with our enemies, the one word “Roman!” is 
all that we have to utter, because, in our parlance, this single bad name 
embraces the whole gamut of meanness, cowardice, avarice, decadence, 
untruthfulness and all the other vices. 

Out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh, 2 and, in 
provoking Liutprand into losing his temper, Nikiphoros had stung his 
Latin guest into proclaiming his sense of solidarity with his Teutonic¬ 
speaking fellow Westerners in a common antipathy against all ‘Romans’. 
In a later and more genial conversation at the imperial dinner table, 
Nikiphdros used the word ‘Franks’ to include Latins as well as Teutons; 3 
and this usage had been justified in advance by Liutprand’s revealing 
outburst. Though Liutprand was a Latin of the Latins in his intellectual 
culture—being as well versed as any Western scholar of his day in the 
Latin version of the classical Hellenic literature—a common Hellenic 
cultural background had not bred in Liutprand’s heart any feeling of 
affinity with the contemporary Greek heirs of the same Hellenic heritage. 
Between this tenth-century Italian and these tenth-century Greeks a 
great emotional gulf was already fixed, whereas there was no gulf of the 
kind between Liutprand and his Saxon employers—W'hosc kinsman he 
instinctively felt himself to be, in virtue of his own Lombard descent 
and Teutonic name, though his intrusive barbarian ancestors had not 
taken long to make themselves at home in Italy by forgetting how to 
speak their original Teutonic mother tongue. From the Byzantine stand- 

K >int this incurably barbarian-hearted Latin was a renegade from the 
ellenic culture into which he had been initiated (even though only at 
second hand); and, at the first audience given to Liutprand by Niki- 

1 Chap. :2. The contempt which Liutprand professed to feel for ‘Romans’ was 
felt by the East Roman Court for the City of Rome, in contrast to Constantinople. 
‘"Look here", they said: "This fatuous, vulgar Pope of yours is ignorant of the historic 
fact that I Jis Sacred Majesty Constantine transferred the imperial sceptre from Rome 
to this city—and, with it, all the Senate nnd the whole of the Roman Army—and left at 
Rome nothing but vile bodies: creatures such as fishermen, pimps, fowlers, bastards, 
proletarians and slaves’” (ibid., chap. 51). Presumably they forgot, in making this 
extempore exposition of the Byzantine case, that one of the fishermen whom Constantine 
had left behind in the Old Rome had been no less a person that the Prince of the 
Apostles. Presumably, too, this crushing retort did not occur to Liutprand either; for, 
if he had thought of it, he would certainly have put it on record. 

1 Matt. xii. 34. * Sec Legatio, chap. 33. 



3S8 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
phdros, ihc Emperor did not hesitate to accuse the Ambassador of having 
been sent by his Saxon employer Otto as a spy. 1 

Liutprand took his revenge by painting a verbal portrait of the 
Emperor—in a document that would never reach Nikiphdros’s eyes and 
in a language that he did not understand—which was as unflattering as 
malice could make it. 

‘The man is a freak, a dwarf, with a great fat head and little mole’s 
eyes. He is disfigured by a stubby, broad, thick, piebald beard sprouting 
from a neck as thin as my finger. He has a porcine mop of bristly hair, and 
he is as black as a nigger—"the sort of fellow you would not care to meet 
after dark”. 1 He is pot-bellied, lean in the backside, too long in the thigh 
for so short a man, but also too spindly in the shanks. His heels stick out 
as far as his toes. He wears an old shabby linen uniform, dirty and faded 
with age, and women’s shoes (sicyoniis calceamentis). He has a wagging 
tongue, a foxy character, and the unscrupulous untruthfulness of a 
Ulysses.’* 

This portrait is a recognizable caricature of authentic descriptions and 
pictures of Nikiphdros; 4 and it is also true that the Emperor’s own 
countrymen, as well as the Lombard stranger, were apt to fall foul 
of him. 5 His tragic death, in the year following Liutprand’s encounter 
with him, through a conspiracy between his wife and a paramour who 
had been her husband’s trusted comrade-in-arms, was a reflection upon 
the character of the victim as well as upon that of his murderers. Yet 
the Western bishop’s utter failure to detect the magnificent soldier 
and the blue-blooded aristocrat beneath this East Roman Emperor’s 
plain and unattractive exterior gives the measure of the blinding animus 
against all things Byzantine by which Liutprand was obsessed, while 
the measure of the Byzantine Society’s superiority over the contempor¬ 
ary Franks in cultivation is given by the contrast between Liutprand’s 
crudely virulent caricature of Nikiphdros and the objective and dis¬ 
criminating verbal portrait, from the hand of the East Roman historian- 
princess Anna Comnena, 6 of the Norman adventurer Bohcmond, a 
blond beast whose pugnacity, treachcrousness, and ambition had given 
far more trouble to Anna’s father and hero the East Roman Emperor 
Alexius I than the East Roman Emperor Nikiphdros II’s brusqueness 
had ever given to Liutprand’s master the West Roman Emperor Otto. 
A minute description of the physique of this corporeally magnificent 
specimen of Nordic Man—‘whose build reproduced the proportions 
of the canon of Polycleitus’—is prefaced by Anna with a generous 
encomium. 


1 Chap. 4. * Juvenal: Satin V, 11 . 53-54. 

* Chap. 3: cp. chaps. 10, 23, 28, and 40. 

* See Hahn, ad loc. , n. 5 on p. 177 of his edition of Liutprand’s works. 

5 The difference in character between the aggressive soldier Nikiphdros and the 
gentle scholar Constantine Porphyrogenitus was pointed out to Liutprand by the im¬ 
perial officials when he complained that the permission to export robes of state of the 
first quality, which was now being refused to him when he was a bishop and an ambas¬ 
sador representing an emperor, had been granted to him on his previous mission to 
Constantinople in Constantine Porphyrogcnitus's reign, when Liutprand had been 
merely a deacon and an envoy representing a prince (chap. 53). 

6 In her AUxiad, cd. by Reitferschcid, A. (Leipzig 1884, Teubner, 2 vols.), Book XIII, 
chap, to- 



ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 389 

‘The like of him was not to be seen in all Romania. There was not a 
barbarian or a Hellene there who could measure up to him. He was not only 
a marvel to behold; he was a legendary figure whose mere description took 
your breath away.’ 

The sting in the Byzantine authoress’ picture of this Frankish human 
tiger lies in the tail. 

'Nature had given an outlet through his heroic nostrils for the mighty 
spirit boiling up from his heart—for it must be confessed that there was 
something attractive about the man’s countenance, though the effect of 
this was marred by the intimidating impression which the whole ensemble 
conspired to convey. The mercilessness of a beast of prey was writ large 
over the whole man in every limb of his body; it was betrayed by some¬ 
thing about his look, in combination with the mightiness of his frame, and 
also by his laugh, which smote other people’s ears like a lion’s roar. His 
spiritual and physical complexion was such that ferocity and lust were 
always rampant in him, and both these passions were perpetually seeking 
vent in war. His intelligence was versatile, unscrupulous, and slippery; 
and in verbal encounters he was completely master of his words and never 
gave his adversary a handle in shaping his answers.’ 1 


* The aversion with which Bohemond’s character inspired Anna, in despite of her 
admiration for the magnificence of his physique, was the usual feeling evoked by the 
Normans in the hearts of their East Roman victims. The hatred which they aroused was 
indeed, in general, so bitter that the Byzantine historians delighted to confound them 
with the Muslims under the generic opprobrious nickname ‘children of Hagnr’. Yet there 
was at least one Norman adventurer who, unlike Bohemond, succeeded in winning the 
affection, as well as the admiration, of the East Romans on whom he imposed himself. 

Russell was a Norman soldier of fortune who had served with the Emperor Romania 
Dhioyinis in a.d. 1071 in the campaign against the Saljuqs that had ended at Melazkcrd 
(Attalciitis; Historia, cd. by Bckkcr, I. (Bonn x853, Weber), p. 148). The collapse of the 
East Roman army and administration in Anatolia tempted the Norman adventurer to 
play for his own hand. He collected a band of Frankish men-at-arms; ensconced himself 
in the Armeniac army corps district in North-Eastern Anatolia; was taken prisoner by 
the Turks and was ransomed by his wife (Attaleiitis, op. cit., p. 193); but was eventually 
taken prisoner by them for the second time through the treachery of a Turkish war¬ 
lord named Tutikh, who, after having given Russella safe-conduct, secretly sold him to 
Alexius Comnenus, who had been sent by the Emperor Michael VII Dhoukas (impera- 
bat a.d. 1071-8) to capture Russell by fair means or foul (Attaleiitis, op. cit., pp. 199 - 
zoo and 206; Vryinnios, Historiae, pp. 85-87). Tutikh duly seized Russell and handed 
him over to Alexius in exchange for hostages whom Tutikh was to hold pending the 
payment of his stipulated price (Vryinnios, op. cit., p. 87). But neither Alexius nor the 
Emperor Michael—who had preferred, as Attalciitis puts it (op. cit., p. 199), to see 
the East Roman Empire in the hands of the Turks rather than to see one piece of East 
Roman territory defended against the Turks by this Latin soldier—had reckoned with 
the local popularity that Russell had acquired. When Alexius called a meeting of the 
local notables at Amasia to ask them to advance him the money to pay Tutakh’s price 
for Russell, against a promise of a refund from the Imperial Treasury, there was an 
uproar. 'They shouted that Russell had never done them any harm, and they tried to 
snatch him from the house where he was under arrest, and to set him at liberty* (Vryin- 
nios, op. cit., p. 89). Alexius extricated himself from these straits by ‘a trick that was as 
humane as it was clever*. He induced Russell to go into collusion with him in making 
a show of putting out Russell’s eyes. The executioner went through the motions; 
Russell acted his part by duly bellowing and groaning; and, when he was displayed to 
the people of Amasia next morning ns a blind man with a bandage over his eyes, ‘this 
comedy effectively quelled the disturbance* (ibid., pp. 90-91). However, on the road 
to Constantinople with his prisoner, Alexius got into trouble with his cousin Theodoro 
Dhokeiands, at whose country house the party stopped to break their journey, 'for having 
blinded such a fine fellow, and one who might have done so much to retrieve East Roman 
fortunes'. Alexius amused himself by keeping his cousin mystified till after luncheon, 
when he made him take the bandage off from Russell’s eyes. Theodore was overjoyed 
to find that, after all, Russell’s eyesight was undamaged, and he congratulated Alexius 
on the adroitness of his play-acting (ibid., pp. 92-93)* 

It is manifest that Russell had won the sympathies, not only of a provincial Greek 



390 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

This fascinating delineation of one of the arch-Franks of Anna’s day* 
is almost equalled in vividness by a panorama of Frankdom in the mass 
which she introduces as an overture to her account of the descent of the 
First Crusade upon Orthodox Christendom. 

‘Intelligence of the approach of innumerable Frankish armies gave the 
Emperor Alexius considerable anxiety. He was only too familiar with the 
Franks’ uncontrollable 1 impetuosity , 3 fickleness of mind 4 and suggesti¬ 
bility, and with the other inveterate characteristics, primary and second¬ 
ary, of the Western Barbarians (KrXroi). He was likewise familiar with the 
insatiable covetousness that has made these barbarians a by-word for the 
light-heartedness with which they take any excuse for tearing up treaties. 
This was the Franks’ standing reputation, and it was completely confirmed 
by their acts. ... The event proved to be even more portentous and more 
fearful than the anticipations. It turned out that the entire West, including 
all the tribes of the barbarians living between the west coast of the Adriatic 
and the Straits of Gibraltar, had started a mass migration 5 and was on 
the march, bag and baggage, for Asia through the intervening parts of 
Europe .’ 6 

The most sorely trying of the afflictions which the Emperor Alexius 
suffered from the passage of the First Crusade was the unlimited call 
which these unwelcome and obtusely inconsiderate visitors made upon 
the precious time of a hard-worked administrator. 

‘From crack of dawn, or at least from sunrise, Alexius made it his prac¬ 
tice to sit on the imperial throne 7 and to let it be known that every- Western 
Barbarian who desired an audience with him could have unrestricted 
access to his presence every day in the week. His motives were the imme¬ 
diate one of wishing to give them the opportunity of presenting their 
requests and the ulterior one of using the divers opportunities that con- 

Orthodox population that was already alienated from the East Roman imperial regime, 
but of the two sophisticated Byzantine men of letters who recorded the story; and this 
episode in the history of Graeco-Frankish relations shows that it was not impossible 
for personal charm to outweigh cultural antipathy. 

1 The same capacity for seeing the light as well as the shadow in the figure presented 
by an alien enemy is shown by Anna in her talc of the Latin fighting priest. Though 
the combatancy of the Latin priests is shocking to her, she feels, and conveys, the pathos 
of this warrior-cleric’s death in battle ( Alexiad, Book X, chap. 8). 

1 Cp. Alexiad, Book X, chap. 5, ad fin.: ‘The Western Barbarians make the impres¬ 
sion of being always hot-headed and vehement and of becoming utterly irrepressible 
when once they have committed themselves to an adventure.’ 

5 Cp. ibid., Book X, chap. 6: 'When the impulse seizes them to embark on a raid, 
they throw reason to the winds and become quite unbridled.’ 

4 Cp. ibid., Book X, chap. 11: The Emperor was aware of the Latins’ proneness to 
change their minds.’ 

* The innumerable Frankish host was appropriately preceded in its advance by a 
likewise innumerable swarm of locusts ( Alexiad , Book X, chap. 5). 

6 Alexiad, Book X, chap. 

7 At one of Alexius’s conferences with the leaders of the Crusade 'a Frankish baron 
had the audacity to scat himself on the Emperor's camp stool. The Emperor put up with 
this without saying a word—being familiar, as he was, with the overbearingness of the 
Latin character—but Count Baldwin came up, seized the fellow by the hand, and pulled 
him off the chair’—with the admonition that, as the Crusaders had now become the 
Emperor’s liegemen, it was incumbent on them to observe the custom of the country*, 
which debarred the Emperor’s subjects from sitting down in the imperial presence, even 
when the Emperor himself was seated. 'The baron answered Baldwin never a word; but, 
transfixing the Emperor with a savage stare, he muttered to himself in his own verna¬ 
cular: “That just shows what a boor the man isl Fancy his monopolising the right to a 
chair with so many famous captains on their feet all round him’” ( Alexiad , Book X, 
chap. 10). 



ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 391 

vcrsation with them would offer to him for influencing them in the 
direction of his own policy. These Western Barbarian barons have some 
awkward national characteristics—an impudence, 1 an impetuosity, a 
covetousness, a lack of self-control in indulging any lust that seizes them, 
and, last but not least, a garrulousness—for which they hold the World’s 
record; and they showed a typical lack of discipline in their abuse of the 
Emperor’s accessibility. 

‘Each baron brought with him into the imperial presence as many re¬ 
tainers as he fancied, and one followed at another’s heels, and a third at 
the second’s heels, in a continuous queue. Worse still, when they held the 
floor they did not set themselves any time-limit for their talk, such as the 
Attic orators used to have to observe. Each Tom, Dick, and Harry took 
just as much time as he chose for his talk with the Emperor. Being what 
they were—with their inordinately wagging tongues and their entire lack 
of respect for the Emperor, lack of sense of time, and lack of sensitivity 
to the indignation of the officials in attendance—they none of them 
thought of leaving any time over for those behind them in the queue; they 
just went on talking and making demands interminably. 

‘The volubility and mercenarincss and banality of the Western Bar¬ 
barians’ talk are, of course, notorious to all students of national characters; 
but first-hand experience has given a more thorough education in the 
Western Barbarians’ character to those who have had the misfortune to 
be present on these occasions. When dusk descended on the proceedings, 
the unfortunate Emperor—who had laboured through the live-long day 
without a chance of breaking his fast—would rise from his throne and 
make a motion in the direction of his private apartments; but even this 
broad hint did not avail to extricate him from being pestered by the 
Barbarians. They would go on jockeying for priority with one another— 
and this game was played not only by those who were still left in the queue; 
those who had already had their audience during the day would now- keep 
on coming back and bringing up one pretext after another for speaking 
to the Emperor again, while the poor man was being kept on his feet and 
was having to put up with this babel of chatter from the swarm of bar¬ 
barians thronging round him. The affability with which this one devoted 
victim kept on responding to the interpellations of the multitude was a 
sight to see, and the unseasonable chatter had no end to it; for, whenever 
one of the chamberlains tried to shut the barbarians up, he would find 
himself shut up, instead, by the Emperor, who was aware of the Franks’ 
proneness to lose their tempers 1 and was afraid of some trifling provoca¬ 
tion producing an explosion that might inflict the gravest injury on the 
Roman Empire. 

'The scene was really most extraordinary. The Emperor w r ould stand 
as stalwartly as if he were a wrought-metal statue made of, say, bronze 
or wrought iron, and he would maintain this posture till any hour in the 
night—sometimes from dusk till midnight, sometimes till the third cock¬ 
crow, sometimes almost till the Sun’s beams became distinctly visible 
again. The courtiers could none of them stay the course; they used to 
withdraw for a rest and then return to the presence thoroughly out of 
temper. None of the Emperor’s lords in waiting could compete with him 
in standing for that length of time without a change of position. All of 

1 If an equivalent of the American word ‘brash’ had existed in Anna's Romaic Greek 
mother tongue, she would have been sorely tempted to blot her Classical Neo-Attic 
copy-book by breaking out, at this point, into the living language of her day. 

* ‘Experience proved them to be chronically stiff-necked and sour-tempered’ ( Alexiad , 
Book XIV, chap. 2). 



392 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
them would keep on shifting their weight from one leg to the other, while 
one would sink into a sitting posture, another would droop his head on 
one side and rest it on his shoulder, and a third would lean against the 
wall. The Emperor alone made no concessions whatever to this extremity 
of physical fatigue. It is really impossible to do justice in words to his 
endurance. In these conversazioni of his with the million, each of his 
interlocutors chattered to excess. It was like the endless jackdaw mono¬ 
logue of the Homeric Thcrsitcs. 1 And when one interlocutor withdrew 
he would yield the floor to another, and the second to a third, and so on 
and so on. These interlocutors of the Emperor’s had only to stand at 
intervals, whereas the Emperor had to stay on his feet interminably—till 
the first cockcrow, or even the second. And then, after the briefest inter¬ 
lude of repose, at the return of sunrise he would be on his throne again, 
with another day of hard labour and ordeals—perhaps twice as severe as 
the last—following at the heels of the labours of the preceding night.’ 1 

The gout to which Alexius was a martyr is ascribed by his daughter to 
the effects of these stances with the importunate Western Barbarians 
rather than to an injury to his knee-cap which the Emperor had sustained 
during a game of polo. 3 

A mutual antipathy of this intensity, which eventually exploded into 
hideous action in the atrocities of a.d. 1182 and 1185 and 1204, might 
have been expected to rule out any possibility of mutual cultural in¬ 
fluence; yet the Crusades did bear fruit in Franco-Byzantine, as well as 
Franco-Armcnian and Franco-Muslim, interchanges of cultural goods. 

After acquiring from the Muslims in the twelfth century of the 
Christian Era the philosophical and scientific abstract from the corpus 
of Hellenic literature that had been translated by Oriental hands from the 
original Greek into Syriac and Arabic, 4 the Medieval Western Christians 
tardily completed their Hellenic literary repertory by acquiring the 
originals of all the surviving works of Hellenic literature in Ancient 
Greek from the Medieval Greek Orthodox Christian carriers of this 
precious cargo on the very eve of the extinction of the political indepen¬ 
dence of the last enclaves of the East Roman Empire in an Orthodox 
Christendom that was being united politically at last under a Pax 
Ottomanica. This literary debt of the West to Orthodox Christendom 5 is 
more notorious, but less remarkable, than the Medieval Greek Orthodox 
Christians’ cultural debt to the, in their eyes, still ‘barbarian’ Medieval 
Western intruders. 

It is one of the surprises of History that the romantic vein in the way 
of life of Frankish knights and barons whose prosaic barbarism had 
proved such a plague to the East Roman Emperor Alexius I Comnenus 

' Iliad, Book II, 1. 212. * Altxiad, Book XIV, chap. 4 - 

> See ibid. * See pp. 371-3, above. 

1 Whether the Western school of painting can be said to be indebted for its inspira¬ 
tion to Byzantine Art is a more debatable question. The response that a Byzantine 
challenge evoked from Giotto and his successors was. not to imitate the Byzantine hieratic 
style, but to break away from it into a naturalistic style that was its antithesis. If a 
Western debt was ever incurred in the artistic commerce between the West and Byzan¬ 
tium, the Byzantine painter to whose account this debt must be credited is the Cretan 
Dhomfnikos Thcotokdpoulos'El Greco' (see IV. iv. 360-1), whose shattering Byzantine 
impact on a, by his time, mature and already over-ripe naturalistic Modem Western 
style began to produce its effects some three hundred years and more after the Byzantine 
artist-revolutionary's death in a.d. 1614. 



ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 3 93 
in a.d. 1096 should have come to exercise a powerful attraction on his 
grandson and second successor Manuel (imperabat a.d. i 143-80);' and it 
is still more noteworthy that, when, after this Francophil East Roman 
Emperor’s death, a Francophobc reaction among the Empire’s Greek 
Orthodox Christian subjects precipitated the Empire’s second and, this 
time, irretrievable, collapse, the thirteenth-century Frankish conquerors 
of Constantinople and the Morea should have done their Greek victims 
the same unintentional but signal literary service that the contemporary 
Mongol conquerors of China likewise inadvertently performed for the 
Chinese. In China the temporary dethronement of the Confucian 
littcrati under a barbarian-administered regime 1 2 gave a belated oppor¬ 
tunity for a submerged popular literature in the living vernacular 
language to rise to the surface of Chinese social life, where it had never 
been allowed to make this shocking display of its vitality under the 
culturally repressive rule of Confucian-minded Chinese civil servants 
who were incurably devoted slaves of the Sinic literary classics. 3 In a 
barbarian-ridden Orthodox Christendom the same cause produced the 
same effect on a minor scale; and the new genres of popular literature— 
the drama and the novel—that came to flower in China in the Yuan Age 
had their counterparts in Medieval Greece under Frankish rule in the 
flowering of a popular lyric and epic poetry that had already been 
foreshadowed in the epic of the ninth-century East Roman borderer- 
barbarians who had broken into the domain of a disintegrating ‘Abbasid 
Caliphate, 4 and that was to be echoed in the ballads of the nineteenth- 
century Greek ra'iyeh brigand-patriot insurgents against the domination 
of a disintegrating Ottoman Empire. 5 

Since the twelfth century of the Christian Era the Franks, in their 
homelands in Western Christendom, had been breaking out of the 
chrysalis of a traditional literary style, conveyed in the vehicle of the 
Latin language, which was the Western literary heritage from an ante¬ 
cedent Hellenic culture, and had been expressing themselves in new 
forms in the French, Provengal, Tuscan, Castilian, High German, 

1 Manuel, in his infatuation with Frankish chivalry, threw to the winds all the wcll- 
considcrcd traditional East Roman scientific military doctrine of equipment and tactics— 
to which his admiring historian John Kinnamoa pays lip-service {Hiitoriae, edited by 
Meineke, A. (Bonn 1836, Weber), pp. 16S-9). Though East Roman professional soldiers 
were critical of the Frankish knights’ excessive weight of body armour, which reduced 
their chargers’ speed, as well as of their lack of discipline (Kinnamos, op. cit., d. 73), 
Manuel celebrated his accession to the imperial throne by converting the East Roman 
cavalry from Avar horse-archers with round targets into Frankish lancers with kite- 
shaped shields (ibid., p. 12s; cp. Khoniatis, Nikitas: Khronihi Dhiiyisii, edited by 
Bekkcr, I. (Bonn 1835, Weber), p. 234), and he could seldom resist the temptation to 
exchange the role of an East Roman general for that of a Frankish champion charging 
recklessly into the blue. Kinnamos records (op. cit., p. 192) that he hod been incredulous 
of the reports of Manuel’s personal deeds of prowess till he had witnessed some of them 
with his own eyes. One of the happiest events in Manuel’s life must have been hi* 
participation, at Antioch in A.D. 1150, in a grand tournament, described by Nikitas 
(op. cit., pp. 141-4). on the occasion of his state visit as the local Norman prince's feudal 
overlord. 

2 The Mongols’ audacious attempt to administer the Middle Kingdom through the 
agency of barbarian officials imported from Dar-al-IslSm and Western Christendom has 
been touched upon in V. v. 349-51. 

1 The Archaism that had already fastened upon the Sinic literature before the days 
of Confucius has been noticed in V. vi. 82-83. 

* See V. v. 252-9. 

B 2898. vm O 2 


J Sec V. v. 297-8. 



394 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

and other living local Western vernaculars of the day; and the Romaic 
Greek language is indebted for its principal literary' monument dating 
from the fourteenth century to an anonymous Moreot Frankish poet 
of the third or fourth generation after the Frankish conquest, who wrote 
The Chronicle of the Morea in the living Greek that was the author’s 
mother tongue, as unselfconsciously as he would have written it in 
French if he had happened to have been born and brought up in the land 
of his forefathers in the domain of the Languc d’Oil instead of overseas 
in a Greek-speaking colonial annex of Medieval Western Christendom. 

Had this Morcot-bred chronicler been a clerk of native Moreot and not 
of exotic Frankish lineage, it would have been far more difficult for him 
—paradoxical though this may sound—to use the same living Romaic 
Greek tongue as a vehicle for literary composition; for, in the Byzantine 
cultural environment, he would have been drilled so rigorously in the 
Attic masterpieces and Neo-Attic conceits of a classical Greek literature 
that he would have become morally incapable of using his living mother 
tongue for any purpose higher than the vulgar demands of practical daily 
life. The Moreot Frankish author of The Chronicle of the Morea was also 
a cultivated man in his own tradition, as the internal evidence of his 
poem reveals. The subject in which this Western clerk was learned was, 
however, not Ancient Greek literature but Medieval French feudal law, 1 
while his classical Hellenic language was not Attic Greek but Latin; and 
the freedom, which was this Moreot Frank’s birthright, from the Byzan¬ 
tine incubus of an Attic Greek literary education enabled an alien enemy 
to endow the Romaic Greek language with a chronicle in the native 
accentual verse which local Greek hands afterwards supplemented and 
revised. 

The most momentous of all the gifts exchanged between a Medieval 
Western Christendom and a contemporary Eastern Orthodox Christen¬ 
dom was the political institution of the absolute authoritarian state, 
which in Orthodox Christendom had been successfully disinterred from 
the sepulchre of a dead Hellenic past by the genius of Leo Syrus some 
two generations before Charlemagne made his abortive attempt in the 
West to perform the same tour de force of political necromancy. This 

C tersely effective Orthodox Christian revival of an institution that had 
n a disintegrating Hellenic Society’s last desperate political resort 
had been communicated to the West as a going concern in the Western 
successor-state which eleventh-century Norman swords had carved out 
of the East Roman Empire’s former dominions in Apulia and Sicily; 2 
and a Byzantine ideal of autocracy, which had been no more than a 
curiosity of Medieval Western institutional history- so long as it had 
been confined to one recently acquired and still outlandish frontier 
province of Western Christendom, became a cynosure of all Western 
eyes—whether they beheld it with admiration or with aversion—when 


*. See The Chronicle of Morea, cd. by Schmitt, J. (London 1Q04, Methuen), pp. xxxviii- 
xlvi. 

* In Sicily the local Norman usurpers of the East Roman dominion over the island 
had been preceded by Maghrib! Muslims who had brought with them an administrative 
technique that had been taken over from the Roman Empire by the Primitive Muslim 
Arab conquerors of Syria, Egypt, and North-West Africa. 



ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 3 95 

it was embodied in the person of a Frederick II Hohenstaufen who, be¬ 
sides being a King of Sicily, was a West Roman Emperor and a man of 
genius. Before the close of the thirteenth century a Byzantine autocracy 
which the Sicilian Stupor Mundi had failed to acclimatize in the West on 
an oecumenical scale was being successfully practised in miniature by 
local despots of North and Central Italian city-states; 1 and before the 
close of the fifteenth century this balefully efficient exotic institution 
was being propagated from Italy into the Transalpine and Transmarine 
provinces of Western Christendom, 2 to compete for their allegiance with 
an indigenous medieval system of government under which a measure 
of political liberty had been secured for at least a privileged minority of 
the population through a division of political powers between feudal 
monarchies and representative parliaments. 

In subsequent chapters of Western history a long-drawn-out struggle 
between two opposing political ideals, which appeared, in the eighteenth 
century, to be coming to a peaceful end in a rapprochement between an 
enlightened form of autocracy and an aristocratic form of parliamentar¬ 
ism, became acute again in the twentieth century, when a parliamen¬ 
tarism that had changed its aim to the new objective of becoming a 
vehicle for Democracy found itself challenged, in the heart of the 
Modern Western World, by an autocracy that had thrown to the winds 
both its eighteenth-century watchword of ‘enlightenment’ and its 
nineteenth-century watchword of ‘legitimacy’ in order to catch a semi- 
educated public in the snare of an unscrupulous propaganda and to 
turn this insidiously bridled and blinkered Leviathan into a pliant in¬ 
strument for a cold-blooded policy of imperialism through military 
aggression. It was no accident that an inter-war Fascist regime in Italy 
and National-Socialist regime in Germany should have borrowed their 
political technique and organization from a recently established Com¬ 
munist regime in a Russia where 'the political concepts embodied in 
the ancient Muscovite state’ had been ‘of Byzantine provenance’. 3 

This surprisingly active and many-sided cultural commerce between 
a Medieval Western and a contemporary Eastern Orthodox Christendom 
proved impotent, however, in the end to overcome the antipathy between 
the rival sister societies; and, when a broken-down Orthodox Christian 
Civilization reached a point in its disintegration at which the only free¬ 
dom of manoeuvre left to its hard-pressed epigoni was a liberty still to 
choose between ‘turning Frank’ and ‘turning Turk’, the Orthodox 
Christian converts to the Iranic Muslim Civilization of the empire- 
building ‘Osmanlis 4 were, as we have already observed, 5 both more 

1 The impulse given to the establishment of local despotisms in Northern and Central 
Italy by the Emperor Frederick II's prestige has been noticed, in another context, in 
VII. vii. 537 - 8 . See further X. ix. 13. 

2 See III. Hi. 300-1, 305, and 357-63: IV. iv. 198-200; and p. 363, above. 

3 Weidle, W.: La Rustic Abtcntc et Pritcnle (Paris 1949, Gallimard), p. 73, quoted on 
p. 677, below. 

4 Some two hundred years before the emergence of the Ottoman Turkish polity, the 
Snljuq Turkish wav of life had exercised an attraction on some of the Greek Orthodox 
Christian victims ot these barbarian invaders of the heartland of the East Roman Empire 
in Central Anatolia. The military disaster at Melazkcrd in a.d. 1071 proved irretrievable 

[Note continued on next page. 

* See pp. xsx—2, above. 



396 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

numerous and more effective than the converts to the contemporary 
Western way of life—even in its attractively precocious North Italian 
version. 

The eminent Greek Orthodox Christian renegade to Islam, Khass 
Murad Palaioldghos Pasha, son of Vitus, who, as Beglerbey of Rumili, 
was killed in the Ottoman Sultan Mehmcd II Fatih’s service in the 
decisive battle fought by the 'Osmanlis at Beyburt in a.d. 1473 against 
the Aq QSyunlu Turkmens, 1 sacrificed his life to greater purpose than 
his elder kinsman the Uniate Constantine Palaiologhos Dhrigasis, who, 
as East Roman Emperor, was killed at Constantinople in a.d. 1453 in a 
hopeless attempt to save a dispossessed Imperial City from resuming 
the role for which Geography had designed her by becoming the capital 
of an Ottoman Empire whose broad dominions had encompassed this 
anomalously surviving metropolitan enclave of East Roman territory on 
every side since a.d. 1360-1. Kose MlkhSl ‘Abdallah, the apostate 
ancestor of Khass Murad Palaioldghos Pasha’s superior officer ‘All 
Bey Mikhaloghlu, had likewise been wiser in his generation, when he 
abandoned Orthodox Christianity for Islam in order to become one of 
the hereditary grandees of a rising Ottoman polity, 2 than Khass Murad’s 

because the Turks who were overrunning Anatolia found collaborators among the East 
Roman provincial population (Michael Attaleiitis: Historia, ed. by Bekker, I. (Bonn 
1853, Weber), pp. 306 and 307). In the second generation of the post-Mclazkcrd era, 
when the Emperor John Comnenus (imperabat a.d. i 118-43) was reconquering a corri¬ 
dor of territory in the southern highlands of Anatolia, where the terrain was less ad¬ 
vantageous to the Saljuq light cavalry than it was on the central plateau, he found that 
the Christian islanders in Bey Shchir Lake were on such friendly terms with their Turk¬ 
ish overlords at Q6niyeh that they resisted by force of arms the Emperor’s summons to 
them to evacuate the islands and migrate into Turkish territory. ‘Their intercourse with 
the Turks of Qfiniyeh had resulted not only in a firm mutual friendship, but in the adop¬ 
tion by the Christians of the Turkish way of life in many respects, and they were so 
friendly with their Turkish neighbours that they regarded the East Romans as their ene¬ 
mies. Habit, ingrained by passage of Time, is indeed stronger than race or religion’ 
(Nikitas Khoniatis: KhronUd Dhilyiiis, ed. by Bekker, I. (Bonn 183c, Weber), p. so; cp. 
John Kinnamos: Historiae, ed. by Meineke, A. (Bonn 1836, Weber), p. 22). John’s own 
nephew and namesake had deserted on the field of battle to the Danishmcnds and had 
subsequently become a convert to Islam and had married the daughter of the Sultan 
of Qoniyeh (Nikitas, op. cit., pp. 48-49). Kinnamos (op. cit., p. 56) reports the death in 
action, in the reign of the Emperor Manuel ( imperabat a.d. 1x43-80), of a Turkish 
commander of East Roman origin named GavrtU. 

The Greek-speaking islanders whom the East Roman Emperor John Comnenus 
evicted from the islands in Bey Shehir Lake in the twelfth century of the Christian Era 
were not the last Chmtian inhabitants of these islands to fraternize with the Turks. 
When the writer and his wife visited Bey Shehir on the 15th November, 1948, they were 
told that the islands were then inhabited by the descendants of Cossack refugees to whom 
the Ottoman Government had given asylum there from the hostility of a Muscovite 
Imperial Government. _ « See I. i. 370. 

1 Before the organization of the Pidishih’s slave-household in and after the reign of 
Sultan Murad I (imperabat a.d. 1360-89), the first two generations of Ottoman empire- 
builders had buttressed the rising dynasty's power by the creation of a small number of 
hereditary grandees, whose interests they sought to attach to those of the House of 
‘Osman by endowing these privileged families with large estates and with important 
public offices that were heritable de facto if not de jure. These primitive aristocratic 
foundations of a familiar conventional type were quickly overlaid by 'the peculiar 
institution’ which was to make the Ottoman Empire s military and political fortunes; 
yet, although the arcanum imperii of the classic Ottoman servile state was its implacable 
proscription of the aristocratic principle of heredity, we know of five houses of grandees 
—representing the House of 'Osman’s first essay in the construction of an Ottoman 
TtoXirevna —which were already so strongly entrenched by Sultan Murad I’s day that 
they managed to survive the adverse change of political and social climate from an 
aristocratic to a servile regime. 

These five families were the Mikhaloghlular, whose hereditary estates were scattered 



ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 3 97 
and ‘All Bey’s contemporary the Greek historian Dhoukas, who had 
abandoned Orthodox Christianity for Roman Catholicism in order to 
take sen-ice with the Genoese despots of one of the Latin regnaperitura 1 
in the Levant—the petty principality, established in Mytilene by the 
Gattilusi in a.d. 1355, that was extinguished by the Ottoman Padishah 
Mehmed II Fatih in a.d. 1462. 1 


through Eastern Thncc and Bulgaria and whose hereditary public office was the com- 
mandcrship-in-chicf of the pre-janissary light infantry known as Aqynjys (see Babingcr, 
Fr., s.v. ’MikhSl-Oghlu’, in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. iii (Leyden 1936, Brill), 

® * ■* 93 “$) ; ,hc Evrendsoghlular, who were entrusted with the Ottoman conquest of 
astern Thrace and Macedonia, remained prominent in Ottoman public life down to 
A.D. 1488, and retained_their hereditary estates round Ycnije Vardar down to the nine- 

Ett- 
aliat 

Maiqojogniuiar (see Babinger, loc. cit., p. 494; Mordtmann, loc. cit., p. 34); the 
TurakhSnoghlular. who were entrusted with the Ottoman conquest of the Frankish 
principalities in Continental European Greece and whose hereditary estates lay round 
Yenishchr (LSrissa), the capital of Great Vlakhfa (see Babinger, Fr., s.v. ‘Turnkhan 
Beg', in the Encyclopardia of Islam, vol. iv (Leyden 1934, Brill), pp. 876-8); and the 
Chenderililer, who held the key office of Grand Vizier for four successive generations 
between a.d. 1386 and a.d. 1499—notwithstanding the deadly offence given to Sultan 
Mehmed II Fatih which proved fatal to the third Chcnderili Grand Vizier, Khalil (see 
Giese, F., s.v. 'Ccndcrili’, in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. i (Leyden 1913, Brill), pp. 

833-4)- 

Of these five privileged houses of hereditary’ Ottoman grandees, no less than three 
appear to have been of Orthodox Christian origin. K6se Mikhal 'Abdallah, the founder 
and eponym of the Mikhaloghlular, was said to have been the renegade local Greek 
Orthodox Christian lord of Chirmcnkia (Turcici Khirmenjik) at the southern foot of the 
Mysian Olympus, near Edrenos (Babinger, loc. cit., p. 403). The town of Mikhfilyj, 
situated at a strategic point between Brusa and the Dardanelles, perhaps derives its 
name from this family (Babinger, loc. cit., p. 495 )- GhSzi Evrcnds Bey, the founder and 
eponym of the Evrcndsoghlular, was said to have been a ci-devant Orthodox Christian 
retainer of the Turkish Muslim Emir of Qarasy, who entered the service of the Ottoman 
Emir Orkhun’s son Suleyman after OrkhSn's conquest of Qarasy in a.d. 1336. As for 
the Malqochoghlular, they would appear to have been renegade Serb Orthodox Christ¬ 
ians if 'Malqoch' is really a Turkish travesty of ‘MarkoviC. 

1 Virgil: Georgies, Book II, I. 498. 

* Greek Orthodox Christians who opted in the fourteenth or fifteenth century of the 
Christian Era for embracing Islam in preference to accepting union with the Western 
Christian Church on Western terms could justify their choice by pointing to their own 
and their ancestors’ experience of the comparative humanity of the Muslims by com- 

S riaon with the Franks. In the East Roman historian Nikitas Khoniltis' Khronikl 
dtyisis the appalling accounts of the sack of Salonica by the Sicilian Normans in 
a.d. 1:85 (pp. 385-980! the edition published at Bonn in 1835 by Weber) and of the 
sack of Constantinople by the so-called 'Crusaders’ in a.d. 1203-4 (ibid., pp. 710-70) 
stand out in glaring contrast to the description (ibid., pp. 653-7) of the Saljflq prince 
Kay Khusru's chivalrous treatment of the East Roman civilians whom he carried away 
captive in a raid on the West Anatolian dominions of the East Roman Empire during the 
reign of the Emperor Alexius III Angclus {itnperabat a.d. 1195-1203). Kay Khusru’s 
kindness to his prisoners during the campaign, and the favourableness of the conditions 
on which he subsequently settled them in his own dominions in the neighbourhood of 
Aq Shehir (the ci-des:ant Philomelium), ‘not only prevented the prisoners themselves 
from feeling any nostalgia for their native land but also attracted to Philomelium many 
East Roman settlers who hsd not been carried away captive by the Turks, on the strength 
of reports of the good treatment that their kinsmen and fellow countrymen had received 
at the Turks’ hands. The truth was that in the [East] Roman World, by our day, the 
springs of Christian virtue had dried up, the truths [of Religion] had ceased to be taken 
seriously, and arbitrary injustice had run riot until the natural affections of the majority 
of the population had been chilled to a degree at which entire Hellenic [i.c. ’Greek’, not 
‘pagan’] communities voluntarily opted for finding new homes among the barbarians 
and rejoiced to get away from their native land’ (ibid., p. 657). In another passage (ibid., 
pp. 762-3) the same East Roman observer expressly draws the contrast between the 
conduct of the Western Crusaders when they captured Constantinople in a.d. 1203-4 
and that of the Muslims when they had recaptured Jerusalem in a.d. 1187 from its 
Western Christian conquerors. The Children of Ishmael did not behave like that; 
indeed, far from it, they showed the most exemplary humanity and clemency to the 



398 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

4. The Medieval West and Kievan Russia 1 

The animosity against Western Christendom, which moved Greek 
Orthodox Christians in the fifteenth century to opt for falling under an 
Ottoman in preference to a Frankish domination, was common to these 
fifteenth-century Greeks and their Russian contemporaries; and indeed, 
before the century was over, the Muscovites had become the protagonists 
in Eastern Orthodox Christendom’s struggle to preserve its ecclesiastical 
independence against Western encroachments. One of the signatories, 
on the Orthodox side, of the Act of Union concluded at Florence in 
a.d. 1439 had been Isidore, the Greek Metropolitan of Moscow; but, 
in a.d. 1441, when, after his return to Moscow, Isidore attempted to 
honour his signature within his diocese, the Grand Duke Basil II 
expelled this Greek betrayer of Orthodoxy, as Isidore appeared to be in 
Muscovite eyes, 2 and seized the opportunity to secure in a.d. 1448 3 the 
election, by the Muscovite hierarchy, of an anti-unionist metropolitan 
of Russian nationality in Isidore’s place. At the same time the Muscovite 
metropolitan see repudiated its allegiance to the Oecumenical Patriarch¬ 
ate; 4 and, when in AJ). 1453 Constantinople had been duly requited for 
her apostasy in a.d. 1439 by succumbing to the ‘Osmanlis, Moscow 'the 
Third Rome’ remained, as we have seen, 5 in Muscovite estimation, the 
sole surviving citadel of Orthodoxy that was both impeccable and 
independent. 

Thus, within five hundred years of Russia’s conversion, the Russian 
branch of Orthodox Christendom had come to be at least as zealous as 
the main body was by this date in its resistance to Western ecclesiastical 
aggression. But this identical position in which the Russians and the 
Greeks were both entrenched in the fifteenth century had been reached 
by them along separate roads at different dates. In the eleventh and 
twelfth centuries, when Gracco-Frankish relations were already be¬ 
coming strained in spite of statesmanlike efforts on both sides to keep 
the peace, 6 Russo-Frankish relations were becoming closer and more 
friendly. The estrangement of the Russians from the West, which had 
gone to more than Greek lengths before the end of the fifteenth century, 
dated no farther back than the thirteenth century; and the reason why 
the break between Russia and the West was thus delayed is evident. In 
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when White Russia and the 

[Western] kinsmen [of the sackers of Constantinople] after they [i.e. the Muslims] had 
taken Jerusalem by force of arms. They did not violate the Latins' womenfolk, they 
did not choke the Holy Sepulchre with corpses. ... All that they did [to the Latins of 
Jerusalem) was to allow them to go their way in peace on payment of ransoms which they 
assessed at a few gold pieces per head—leaving all the rest of the Latins' property to its 
owners, even in cases where their wealth was as abundant as the sands ol the sea. This 
was how the adversaries of Christ treated Latins who from their standpoint were infidels. 
They chivalrously forbore to put them to the sword or subject them to the divers tor¬ 
ments of fire, famine, persecution, denudation, tribulation, oppression—or any of the 
other atrocities which those professedly Christian co-religionists of ours committed 
against us, as we have recorded in outline, without their having any provocation on our 
part to bring up against us.’_ « See xi, maps 41, 42, and 43. 

1 See Platonov, S.: Hisloire de la Russie (Paris 1929, Payot), pp. 166-7. 

3 See Halecki, O.: ‘Lcs Trois Romes’, in Le Flambeau, 31® annde, No. 3 (Brussels 
1948). p. 281.' * See Platonov, op. cit., loc. cit. 

* In VI. vu. 31-40. 6 See pp. 376-80, above. 



ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 399 
Ukraine were being progressively subjugated by the Lithuanians and 
the Poles, Russian Orthodox Christendom was being hit, for the first 
time, by a wave of Western aggression 1 which had struck the main body 
of Orthodox Christendom some two or three hundred years earlier, 
when the Normans had invaded the East Roman Empire’s dominions in 
Southern Italy. In the Russian case, as in the Greek, the estrangement 
from the West was the consequence of an unhappy first-hand experience 
of unpleasant Western behaviour. 

Russia’s earliest relations with Western Christendom had been, like 
Bulgaria’s, a consequence of her reception of Christianity at the hands of 
the Oecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople; for, though, as we have 
seen, 2 Russia—insulated, as she was, from the East Roman Empire by 
the two-fold barrier of the Black Sea and the Steppe—could afford to 
take less seriously the political subordination to the East Roman 
Empire’s sovereignty which was the juridical consequence of becoming 
an ecclesiastical subject of the Constantinopolitan Patriarchate, this 
political corollary of adhesion to the Constantinopolitan Church was 
sufficiently awkward, even for the comparatively distant Russians, to 
make them, too, like the Bulgarians, explore the alternative possibility of 
entering the fold of Western Christendom. Olga, the first Russian royal 
proselyte, sent a mission in a.d. 959 to Otto I to ask him for a bishop 3 after 
she had received baptism at Greek hands; and, though Otto’s candidate 
Adalbert did not reach Kiev before Olga’s deposition by her pagan son 
Svyatoslav, 4 her grandson Vladimir, when, at Kherson in a.d. 989, he 
was bringing Russia once for all into the Eastern Orthodox Christian 
communion, sought to reinsure himself by receiving a visit from a papal 
envoy. 5 Vladimir afterwards gave facilities to St. Bruno for a mission 
to the Pechcncgs on the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe; 6 
and five embassies from Rome to Russia, and two embassies to Rome 
from Kiev, in Vladimir’s reign alone, are mentioned in the Russian 
chronicles. 7 

In the event, Russia not only adhered, as Bulgaria had finally adhered, 
to Eastern Orthodox Christendom; she also voluntarily accepted the 
ecclesiastical supremacy of the Oecumenical Patriarchate, to which 
Bulgaria submitted only under force majeure. The first Greek metro¬ 
politan of Kiev, Thcdpemptos, ascended his throne in a.d. 1039 as the 
Oecumenical Patriarch’s subordinate, 8 and thereafter, till the Kievan 
period of Russian history was brought to an end, mid-way through the 
thirteenth century, by the Mongol conquest, all but two of the metro¬ 
politans of Kiev, and about half the bishops of the Russian dioceses, 
were of Greek nationality. 9 There were, it is true, some symptoms of 
Russian rcstiveness under this Greek ascendancy. Whatever may be the 
significance of the fifty years’ interval between the conversion of Vladimir 

1 See II. ii. 172-3, and p. 357, above. 

1 On p. 152, n. 6, above. Sec, further, pp. 676—7, below. 

J Sec Vernadsky, G.: Kievan Russia (New Haven 1948, Yale University Press), p. 
4i, and Dvomik. F.: The Making 0/ Central and Eastern Europe (London 1940, Polish 
Research Centre), p. 68. * See Dvomik, op. cit., pp. 69-70. 

s See Vernadsky, op. at, p. 65. . 6 See Dvormk, op. at., pp. 201-2. 

7 Prince D. Obolensky, in a note to the writer. 

8 See Vernadsky, op. cit., p. 79. 9 See ibid., pp. 152 and 350. 



400 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
at Kherson in a.d. 989 and the arrival at Kiev of the first Greek metro- 

E olitan as a representative of the Oecumenical Patriarch, 1 the Romano- 
ussian war of a.d. 1043-6 is described by the Byzantine historian 
Psellus 2 as 4 a revolt of the Russians’ that was provoked by their ‘hatred 
of the hegemony of the Romans’. 3 In a.d. 1051 and again in a.d. i 145-7 
unsuccessful attempts were made in Russia to throw off the Constantino- 
politan Patriarchate’s ecclesiastical control. 4 Yet, though in the Kievan 
period Russia already ‘formed a distinct socio-political body of her 
own’, 5 it is nevertheless true that, ‘culturally, Russia may be thought of 
in this period as the northern frontier of Byzantium’. 6 The conversion 
of Russia to the Byzantine culture is exemplified in her reception of 
East Roman law 7 and of Byzantine literature, 8 and its fruits arc apparent 
in her precocity. 9 Like the contemporary Greek World, and unlike the 
contemporary Frankish World, Kievan Russia was an urban society 
with a money economy and with a lay, as well as a clerical, educated 
class. 10 


'There is a noticeably greater similarity between Kievan Russia and 
Byzantine and Classical Antiquity than between Russia and Feudal 
Europe. Only, in this connexion, one would think—in addition to the 
Byzantine Empire—not of the Roman Empire but of Republican Rome 
and the Greek democracies.... In this period there was a basic difference 
in economic and political development between Russia and [Western] 
Europe.’" 


This difference, however, did not prevent a Byzantine Kievan Russia 
and an Early Medieval Western Christendom from entering into econo¬ 
mic, political, and cultural relations with one another. The contem¬ 
poraneous conversion of Russia to Orthodox Christianity and of 
Hungary, Poland, and the Scandinavian countries to Western Christianity 
at the turn of the tenth and eleventh centuries not only made the old 
waterway between the Russian and Swedish provinces of a former pagan 
Scandinavian World into a channel of communication between the two 
Christendoms; it also established a long land-frontier between them 
running from the northern slopes of the Carpathians to the southern 
edge of a persisting pocket of paganism in the hinterland of the south- 


‘ Pdnce Obolensky notes: ‘The Byzantine and the Russian sources are curiously 
silent on the status and organization of the Russian Church during the fifty years that 
foUowed Vladimir's conversion. This has led a number of historians to conclude that 
the Russian Church was not directly subordinated to the Patriarchate of Constantinople 
until a.d. 1037-9, and to suppose that, before that date, it was either subject to Ochrida 
or to Rome, or was autocephalous. My own view is that these different theories are not 
convincing, and that circumstantial evidence and the testimony of later sources strongly 
suggest that V ladlmir’s Church was from the beginning subject to the authority of 
Constantinople. But it seems quite probable that Vladimir used his considerable mili¬ 
tary resources and political powxr as bargaining counters in his unsuccessful attempt to 
manage his own ecclesiastical affairs. 

* S « e Pwlhis. Michael: Chronograph™, chap. 91 (p. 129 in C. Snthas' edition 
(London 1809, Methuen)). 

> To Bdppapov . . . roCro 4 >v\ov ini r^v 'Po>pa io*v ijye/ionav rov vdura vpoi-ov XimS 

1 Vernadsky, op. cit., pp. 82 and 218-19. 

s Ibid., p. i2. 6 Ibid., p. 12. 

7 5 ®* Vernadsky, op. cit., pp. 168, 171, and 292-4. 

* Sce ibid., pn. 80 and 271-5, and the present Study, X. ix. 7x5-17. 

* , S , CC Dvomik, op. cit.. pp. 236-40. 10 See Vernadsky, op. 

11 Vernadsky, op. cit., pp. 212 and 213. 


cit., p. 280. 



ENCOUNTERS WITH THE MEDIEVAL WEST 401 
east corner of the Baltic Sea; and the debatable territory between 
Russia and Poland round Przemysl and Czervien, which Vladimir had 
conquered from the Poles in a.d. 981,' became one of the principal 
avenues for a two-way traffic. 

On the economic plane a Russian overland trade with Western 
Christendom was stimulated by the progressive economic adversity 
which overtook the East Roman Empire from a.d. 1071 onwards. In the 
days of the Empire’s prosperity the Russians had sent an annual flotilla 
to trade with Constantinople as the next best thing to a military conquest 
of her that they had failed to achieve; but, when, as a result of the 
Saljuq Turkish barbarian invaders’ decisive victory at Melazkerd, the 
East Roman Empire lost command of the food-producing areas in 
the interior of Anatolia, and, when, as a result of the Romano-Venetian 
commercial treaty of a.d. 1082, the Venetians, emulated by their Italian 
competitors, wrested the maritime trade of the Levant out of Greek 
hands and diverted it to Western ports, the Russians found it more 
profitable to divert their own trading activities from an impoverished 
Constantinople to a prospering West. 1 2 A German record of customs 
receipts testifies that Russian traders were entering East Francia over¬ 
land from the cast as early as a.d. 903-6. 3 4 * 6 From the eleventh century to 
the thirteenth—when the overland trade route between the West and 
Russia was superseded by a water route via the Baltic, Riga, and 
Novgorod—Regensburg was the main Western terminal of a traffic 
whose main Russian terminal was Kiev via Smolensk (which, in this 

age, had a greater volume of trade with Germany than either Novgorod 
or Pskov)/ The transfer of Russian trade from the East Roman Empire 
to Germany was still further stimulated by the disaster that overtook 
Constantinople in a.d. 1204/ 

On the political plane the desire of Kievan Russia to entertain rela¬ 
tions with Western Christendom may be gauged from the number of 
royal marriages contracted between members of the House of Rurik 
and members of the royal families of Western Christendom. Imperial 
marriages with East Roman princesses were, no doubt, more highly 
prized/ The Emperor Basil II’s offer of his daughter Anna’s hand in 
A.D. 988 was the bait which induced Vladimir I to send military help to 
Basil against the rebel Bardas Phokas 7 and then to receive baptism; and 
the King Solomon of the Kievan state, Vladimir Monomdkh ( principal- 
tumgerebat a.d. 1113-25), derived his surname from his Greek mother, 
whose family had been made illustrious by the Emperor Constantine 

1 See Dvomik, op. cit., p. 90, and Vernadsky, op. cit., p. 59. 

2 See Vernadsky, op. cit., p. 216. 

3 Sec Dvornik, F.: ‘The Kiev State and its Relations with Western Europe’, in 
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th series, vol. xxix (London 1947, R. H. S.), 

pp. 27-46. The present reference is to p. 42. 

4 See ibid., p. 42; cundem, The Making of Central and Eastern Europe, p. 24S; Ver¬ 

nadsky. op. cit., pp. 338-9. J See Vernadsky, op. cit., p. 6. 

6 It is noteworthy that there were no marriages between Kurikids and members of any 
Bulgarian imperial family, though, according to Prince D. Obolensky, in a note to the 
present writer, the Bulgarian clergy had contributed to the conversion of Russia, and 
though, thereafter, Bulgaria played an important part as a cultural intermediary between 
Byzantium and Russia (Vernadsky, op. cit., p. 324). 

7 See Vernadsky, op. cit., p. 63. 



402 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
Monomdkhos ( imperabat a.d. 1042-54). Yet, in default of Greek imperial 
marriages, Frankish royal marriages were sedulously sought after by 
Russian princes. Vladimir I obtained the hands of a Polish and a 
Swedish princess for his two sons, and married his three daughters to a 
king of Hungary and two kings of Poland. Yaroslav obtained the hands 
of a Polish and two German princesses for his sons, and married his 
daughters to kings of Norway, France, and Hungary. Vsevolod’s daughter 
Eupraxia (Francice Praxedis) married first the Margrave of the East 
Frankish Nordmark, Henry of Stade, and then the Holy Roman Emperor 
Henry IV (an unhappy marriage, from which she retired to Kiev in a.d. 
1095). Vladimir Monomdkh married Gytha, the daughter of King 
Harold of England. Vladimir and Isyaslav, the sons of Yaroslav, married 
their daughters to kings of Poland and Hungary. Vladimir Monomakh 
obtained the hand of a Swedish princess for his son and married his 
daughters to a king of Hungary and two kings of Denmark. 1 

The footprints of peddlars, brides, and bridegrooms were followed 
by pilgrims and monks. In the early twelfth century the shrines of Kiev 
were visited by Western pilgrims, and before the close of the century 
a church and monastery had been built there by Irish monks from 
Regensburg. 2 These religious wayfarers brought with them cults of 
saints and translations of books, and, in this cultural commerce between 
a Kievan Russia and an Early Medieval Western Christendom, the 
principal intermediary was Bohemia, 3 where a Methodian Slavonic tradi¬ 
tion that had been persecuted by the Franks and betrayed by the Vatican 
had managed to survive 4 till the close of the eleventh century. 5 Old 
Slavonic translations, made in Bohemia, of Latin lives of the Saints 
found their way into Russia along the overland commercial route, and 
popularity was achieved in Russia by a late-eleventh-century prayer, 
translated into Old Slavonic out of an original Latin text, invoking 
Saints Magnus, Cnut, Olaf, Alban, Botolph, Martin, Victor, Linus, 
Anacletus, Clement, Leo, Cyril and Methodius, Wenceslas and 
Adalbert. 6 

'Russia was never more conscious of her common interests with 
Western Europe 7 than in the period between the eleventh and thirteenth 

' T *?? se marriages between Rurikids and Frankish royalties are noted by Dvornik in 
J he Kiev state and its Relations with Western Europe’, d. 41. 

2 See Dvomik, ‘The Kiev State’, p. 40. 

* See Dvomik, op. cit., p. 39. 

4 See ibid., pp. 36-37. 

I0 *6 c b “ vomc ' nle monaster y of Sdzava, near Prague, was not suppressed till a.d. 

5 See ibid., p. 38. 



r* . , . . . -.-- expense—is the institution in Russian 

Orthodox Christendom, soon after a.d. 1091 (see Dvornik, ‘The Kiev State', p. 40). of 
an annual feast in honour of the translation’ of the relics of St. Nicholas fwhn *v#r\fita1Ur 




ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM 403 

centuries.’ 1 It is the more remarkable, and the more tragic, that, between 
the thirteenth century and the fifteenth, a Western aggressiveness that 
had already alienated the main body of Orthodox Christendom should 
have contrived also to dissipate this accumulated fund of Russian good¬ 
will. 


(c) ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CIVILIZATIONS OF THE FIRST 
TWO GENERATIONS 

i. Encounters with the Post-Alexandrine Hellenic Civilization 2 

Likenesses and Differences between the Post-Alexandrine Hellenic and the 
Modern Western Eruption 

In a post-Alexandrine Hellenic view of Hellenic history the generation 
of Alexander the Great marked a break with the past and the beginning 
of a new era as sharply as, in a Modern Western view of Western history, 
the transition to a ‘modern’ from a ‘medieval’ age was marked by a con¬ 
juncture of striking new departures on divers planes of activity at the 
turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of the Christian Era. 3 

In both these new chapters of history the most obvious ground for a 
hybristic depreciation of the achievements of the past by comparison 
with present experiences and expectations was the consciousness of a 
sudden immense increase in power, including both a power over other 
human beings, manifested in military conquests, and a power over 
Physical Nature, manifested in geographical explorations and scientific 
discoveries. The Macedonian conquistadores' feat of overthrowing the 
Achaemenidae was as exhilarating as the Spanish conquistadores' feat of 
overthrowing the Incas. If a handful of military adventurers could 
thus shatter, at one blow, a universal state that had come to seem part of 
the permanent order of Nature, the society out of whose bosom these 
adventurers had issued forth might account herself, in virtue of their 
demonstration of her prowess, to be the potential mistress of all the rest 
of Mankind. But this enhanced sense of military and political power was 
not the whole, and indeed not the essence, of a new experience which 
expressed itself in the feeling that a new era had begun. If either a Hel¬ 
lene of the third century B.c. or a Westerner of the sixteenth century of 
the Christian Era had been asked to describe the sensations by which 

1087 had ‘succeeded in carrying them off by a mixture of cunning and violence’ (Obo¬ 
lensky, loc. cit.). 

The Russian liturgical office composed for the celebration of the new festival certainly 
takes the Western side, to judge bv the following passages: 'The city of Bari rejoices, 
and with it the whole Universe exults.... Like a star thy relics have gone from the East 
to the West . . . and the city of Bari has received divine grace by thy presence .... If 
now the country of Myra is silent, the whole World, enlightened by the holy worker 
of miracles, invokes him with songs of praise.' 

One explanation of this unequivocally pro-Bariot Russian line in a dispute in which the 
Bariots were flagrantly in the wrong is perhaps to be found in the fact that Bari was a 
familiar, and Myra an unfamiliar, place to Russians of that generation. Till the Norman 
conquest in a.d. xo“j Bari, as well as Myra, had been a city of the East Roman Empire, 
and a garrison of Russian troops had been posted at Bari in a.d. 1066 (see Dvomik, 
ibid.). 

' Dvomik, ‘The Kiev State’, p. 45. * See xi, maps 24, 27, 28, 20, 31, 32. 

3 These two unofficial new eras have been noticed in V. vi. 340-2 and VI. vii. 300. 


4o 4 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
his consciousness of a new era was sustained, he would probably have 
given less weight to his sense of an enhancement of his society’s material 
power than to his sense of an expansion of its mental horizon. In the 
sensation produced by the discovery ‘in real life’ of a hitherto fabulous 
India to which the Macedonians made their way by opening up a conti¬ 
nent, and the Portuguese by mastering the Ocean, the sense of power 
arising from the successful performance of a mighty feat of exploration 
was accompanied and qualified, on both occasions, by a sense of wonder 
at the revelation of a marvellous alien world endowed with a myster- 
\ously inimitable skill and wisdom. In the sensation produced in the 
Hellenic World by the scientific discoveries of an Aristotle or a Theo¬ 
phrastus, and in the Western World by the ‘renaissance’ of the Hellenic 
culture, the sense of power arising from a notable addition to knowledge 
and understanding was likewise accompanied and qualified by a sense of 
impotence in face of the reminder of Man’s relative ignorance which 
every addition to Man’s understanding of the Universe is apt to brine 
with it. r b 

This comparison of the Hellenic World’s experience in and after the 
generation of Alexander the Great with the Western World’s experience 
at the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries of the Christian 
Era might offend the amour propre of post-Modcrn Western readers 
who had not yet emancipated themselves from the Modern Western 
World s irrational belief in its own uniqueness. But, before deciding to 
dismiss the suggested parallel as an unwarranted impertinence, Western 
believers in the incomparability of their own society would be well 
advised to put themselves on the alert against the distorting effects of 
the egocentric illusion’ on a historian’s perspective, 1 and, in a chastened 
frame of mind, to give a dispassionate consideration to the facts. 

Even on the crudely simple test of the comparative extent of the areas 
over which the Modem Western Civilization and the post-Alexandrine 
Hellenic Civilization respectively succeeded in radiating their influence, 
it might be observed that Hellenism had anticipated the West in pushing 
its waytothe extremities of the Old World-as far as Ceylon and Japan 

?K- d ^? ta 'i 1 ~7 and that ’ ,f ‘?| exandcr had lived to be so tormented by his 
thirst for finding new worlds to conquer as to have been stimulated’into 
forestalling the fifteenth-century Portuguese invention of ocean-going 
sailing ships he might have forestalled the Spanish discovery of the 
;^™ n y ? find,hal no . civilization had yet emerged there above 
the dead level of primitive social life. If future research into the chrono- 
logy of the indigenous American civilizations were to confirm the 
probability that the genesis of the earliest of them was posterior to Alex¬ 
ander s day, then the post-Alexandrine Hellenic Society would prove to 
have anticipated the Modern Western Society in having achieved the 
feat of making an impact on all existing contemporary societies of its 
own species; and when we call the roll of these two supremely aggres¬ 
sive civilizations respective victims, we find that their numbers arc 
approximately cqua The post-Alexandrine Hellenic Civilization was 
encountered by the Syriac, the Hittite, the Egyptiac, the Babvlonic, the 

1 See I. i. 157-64. 



ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM 405 
Indie, and the Sinic; the Modern Western Civilization by the Orthodox 
Christian the Islamic the Hindu, and the Far Eastern. Even if we 
multiply the number of the Modern West’s victims by adding the Jews 
to the list and by distinguishing an Iranic from an Arabic Muslim 
society, and Russian and Japanese branches from the respective main 
bodies of the Orthodox Christian and Far Eastern societies, we shall 
only have brought the number of the Modern West’s victims up to 
eight, as against the six victims of the Modern West’s post-Alcxandrine 
Hellenic rival. r 

On this showing, we may venture to conclude that our comparison is 
a legitimate one, but, in vindicating it, we must also take note of one 
important difference. In studying the impact of the Modern West on its 
contemporaries’ we have found occasion to distinguish between an 
Early Modern Age, in which the West was radiating out its culture in 
its full-blooded entirety, including the religious clement that was its 
essence, and a Late Modern Age, in which the West was radiating out a 
secular extract from its culture, from which the religious element had 
been eliminated. 1 There is no corresponding division of chapters in the 
post-Alcxandrine history of the radiation of Hellenism; for, by compari- 
son with the Western Civilization, Hellenism was precocious. The 
Western Civilization did not secularize its Weltanschauung till the close 
of the seventeenth century of the Christian Era, a thousand years after 
its entry on to the stage of History through its emergence from a post- 
He erne social interregnum. The corresponding Aufkldrung in the 
tieilcmc World took place towards the close of the fifth century b.c., not 
more than seven hundred years after a post-Minoan social interregnum 
had brought an Hellenic Civilization to birth. Thus, by Alexander’s day, 
this Hellenic Aufkldrung was already a hundred years old, and there was 
no first chapter of post-Alcxandrine Hellenic history in which Hellenism 
was propagated in its original integrity. The Attic drama that was pre¬ 
sented to Parthians and Spaniards was not the communal religious rite 
that was celebrated in the theatre of Dionysus at Athens at annual festi¬ 
vals that were red-letter days in the local Attic ecclesiastical calendar; 
it was a commercial performance staged by a vagrant international 
dramatic artists’ guild trading under the name Aioviaov Ttyylrai* 

One of the possible reasons for the Hellenic Civilization’s compara¬ 
tive precocity in bursting out of the intellectual swaddling clothes of 
traditional religion is the apparent poverty of the Hellenic Society’s 
religious heritage from the antecedent Minoan Society 3 by comparison 
with the richness of the Christian heritage bequeathed to* the Western 
Society by a Hellenism which had been converted to Christianity on its 
death-bed.* In Hellenic history the comparative insignificance of a 
religious legacy, which, in Western history, was to act as both a powerful 
1 £ cc PR- n8_, 9 and 316-24, above. 

* § 5 * ,V - IV : * 43 : V. v. 201. n. 1, and 481; and p. 5x8, below. 

1 The question whether Orphism is or is not to be regarded as a legacy to the Hellenic 
bociety from the religious experience of a disintegrated Minoan Society has been dis¬ 
cussed in I. 1. 95-100 and in V. v. 84-7- See further X. ix. 738-40. 

« In a previous context (VII. vii. 420-3) we have come to the conclusion that the heri¬ 
tage of a higher religion isa feature that distinguishes the civilizations of the third genera¬ 
tion, as a sub-species, from those of the second generation and the first. 




406 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
stimulus and a heavy incubus, can be seen to have had a twofold effect. 
On the one hand it allowed Rationalism to raise its head more easily, and 
therefore more early, than it was to prove possible for Rationalism to 
triumph in Western Christendom; but on the other hand an intellec¬ 
tually enlightened Hellenic World never showed itself so prone as a 
secularized Late Modern Western World to intellectual hybris. 

The Western pioneer rationalists’ successive experiences of being first 
embittered by the length and arduousness of their struggle with a formid¬ 
ably entrenched Western Christian Church, and then intoxicated by the 
apparent completeness of their eventual victory, bred in them a temper 
expressed in the Voltairian war-cry ‘ficrascz l'lnfimc’; and this un¬ 
enlightened spirit of intolerance, which a Modern Western Enlighten¬ 
ment had caught from the Judaic religion against whose dominion it had 
revolted, made a self-emancipated West equally unwilling to give 
credence, credit, or quarter to ‘the imposture’ of Muhammad or to any 
other of the living higher religions with which it was being brought into 
contact by the world-wide activities of its mariners, traders, and empire- 
builders. In this temper the Late Modern Western rationalist intellect 
did not hesitate to banish Religion itself from its mental kingdom of 
spiritual forces and values as a superfluous, illusory, and morbid excres¬ 
cence on the healthy tissue of the rational human animal’s social and 
cultural life; but the earlier victory of the Hellenic Enlightenment over 
a less tenacious religious conservatism had a different sequel. 

In this Hellenic spiritual passage of arms a disgust at the light¬ 
hearted immorality of the shameless barbarian pantheon of Olympus, 
and a revulsion from the spiritually deeper, but also darker, stratum of 
Hellenic religious life that was tapped by the ‘chthonic’ cults of blood 
and soil, were quickly overborne by an unsatisfied hunger for spiritual 
bread which had already begun to torment Hellenic souls before the 
fifth-century Aufklarung had deprived them of even the stony substitute 
which was all that had been doled out to them by the parsimony of 
History. When the triumphal progress of their military and intellectual 
conquests brought the post-Alexandrine Hellenes into contact with 
full-blooded non-Hellenic religions whose spiritual value and efficacy 
seemed to be guaranteed by their manifestly assured command of their 
votaries’ voluntary allegiance, the emotion that this spectacle evoked in 
Hellenic hearts had more in it of a wistful envy for the privileged pos¬ 
sessors of a spiritual pearl of great price 1 than of a contemptuous pity for 
the dupes of an unscrupulously fraudulent priestcraft. Even the syncre- 
tistic religious cults devised by coldly calculating post-Alexandrine 
Hellenic statesmen—such as Ptolemy Sbter’s attempt to bring his 
Egyptiac and Hellenic subjects together on common religious ground 
through his manufacture of the hybrid divinity Sarapis, 2 or Augustus’s 
institution of Cacsar-worship to serve as the religious cement for a 
Roman-built Hellenic universal state 3 —were tributes to their Hellenic 
subjects’ horror of a religious vacuum, besides being designs for taking 
advantage of their non-Hellenic subjects’ religiosity. 

This receptive attitude of the post-Alexandrine Hellenic conquerors 

• Sec V. v. 545-9. * See V. v. 689-91. J See V. v. 648-50. 



ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM 407 
towards the religions of societies which Hellenism had taken captive on 
the intellectual as well as on the military plane was one cause of the 
momentous religious consequences of an aggressive Hellenic Civiliza¬ 
tion’s impact on six societies of the same species. We must take the 
measure of a post-Alexandrine Hellenism’s flow and ebb if we are to 
see its religious consequences in their historical setting. 


The Flow and Ebb of Post-Alexandrine Hellenism 

In a process of penetration that resulted in a temporary Hellenization 
of the World, the entering wedge thrust in by Alexander the Great and 
his Macedonian and Roman successors was the death-dealing point of 
the sarissa and the pilum, and the first objective of these Hellenic military 
aggressors was the economic exploitation of their victims. Yet their 
profession of the nobler aim of propagating the achievements and ideals 
of the Hellenic culture was something more than a specious camouflage 
for the pursuit of a sordid self-interest by methods of barbarism. This 
profession was also partially sincere, and the warrant of its sincerity was 
the extent of its translation from words into facts. 

The Hellenic conquerors’ master-instrument for the fulfilment of 
their promise to impart the spiritual wealth of the Hellenic culture in ex¬ 
change for appropriating a share of the material wealth of the populations 
whom they had conquered was the institution, in partibus Orientalium 
et Barbarorum , of Hellenic city-states, created ex nihilo by a politic¬ 
ally omnipotent Hellenic war-lord’s fiat, out of which a nucleus of 
privileged Hellenic citizen-colonists was to radiate the light of Hellenism 
among the subject native peasantry of the surrounding country-side 
from whom the intrusive landlord-missionaries drew their rents. A 
policy that had been inaugurated on the grand scale by Alexander the 
Great himself was pursued thereafter, for some four and a half centuries, 
by Alexander’s Macedonian and Roman successors down to the Emperor 
Hadrian. 1 

Even in Egypt, where the economic exploitation of the indigenous 
population was more efficient and more overt than in any other land on 
which Hellenism had imposed itself by conquest, 2 and where ‘the 
natives’, on their side, had been wont, since the Hyksos’ conquest of 
Egypt not much less than fourteen hundred years before Alexander’s 
day, to reject the culture of successive alien conquerors with a demonic 
animosity, 3 at least a veneer of the Hellenic city-state dispensation was 
laid over the granite rock-bottom of a petrified Egyptiac body social 
before the end of the story of the encounter between these two dramatic¬ 
ally diverse civilizations. In their anxiety not to diminish the Egyptian 
milch-cow’s scientifically managed yield, Alexander’s narrow-hearted 
Ptolemaic successors deliberately forbore, in Egypt, from further 
foundations of Hellenic city-states after they had added Ptolemais to 
Alexandria and to a pre-AIcxandrine Naucratis; and the unimaginative 
Roman successors of the Ptolemies had no other aim in Egypt than to 
maintain the yield which the Ptolemies had taught them to extract; yet, 
in the third century of the Christian Era, in an age in which the spread 
• See VI. vii. hi and 132-5. * See pp. 696-8, below. J Sec VI. vii. 49-50. 



4 o8 encounters between contemporaries 

of the Hellenic city-state dispensation was coming to a halt in other 
provinces of an Hellenic universal state, the immemorially ancient 
cantons (‘nomes’) of Egypt were being superficially converted into the 
simulacra of self-governing municipalities equipped with the amenities 
of Hellenic urban life. 1 Outside Egypt, in their Asiatic possessions, even 
the Ptolemies had vied with their Selcucid neighbours and rivals in 
showing themselves worthy heirs of their common master Alexander— 
as was witnessed by a chain of Hellenic city-states, strung along the 
Transjordanian stretch of ‘the King’s Highway’ 2 from Gadara to a 
Rabbath Ammon masquerading as Philadelphia, 3 which were eventually 
taken over by the Seleucidae from their Ptolemaic founders, and by the 
Romans from the Seleucidae. 

This more or less benevolently despotic propagation of the Hellenic 
culture by Hellenic conquerors is not, however, so remarkable as its 
spontaneous adoption by non-Hellenes who were under no external 
compulsion to open their hearts and minds to it. A Philadelphia and an 
Adrianople, whose names commemorate their foundation by some 
Macedonian or Roman potentate, arc less eloquent monuments of the 
Hellenic culture’s intrinsic attractiveness than a Nicomedia and a Nicaea, 
whose names commemorate their foundation by the Philhellene descen¬ 
dants of a barbarian prince of Bithynia who had thrown off the yoke of 
the Achaemenidae, had escaped being conquered by Alexander, and had 
successfully resisted the imperialism of the Seleucidae. In the Antonine 
Indian Summer of Hellenic history, these post-Alcxandrinc Hellenic 
city-states that owed their existence to the unconstrained Philhellenism 
of ci-devant barbarians could proudly point to the achievements of an 
Arrian of Nicomedia 4 and a Dio of Prusa as evidence that they were 
making as great a contribution to Hellenic life and letters in that genera¬ 
tion as Antioch or Alexandria, not to speak of Chaeronea or Athens. 

Thus, in the event, the post-Alexandrine Hellenic culture made 
peaceful conquests of ground which had not been won for it by Mace¬ 
donian or Roman soldiers, while in other regions, over which the tide 
of Hellenic military conquest had once flowed victoriously, the ebb of 
Hellenism in this repellantly aggressive guise was followed by a politic¬ 
ally liberated non-Hellenic population’s voluntary reception, on their 
own initiative, of an Hellenic culture to whose aesthetic and intellectual 
attractions they had remained impervious so long as this alien Weltan¬ 
schauung had been made odious to them by being associated with their 
forcible subjection to a distasteful alien rule. The cultivation of Hellenic 
art in the Kushan successor-state of a Bactrian Greek empire astride 
the Hindu Kush in the last century B.C. and the first century of the 
Christian Era, and the cultivation of Hellenic science and philosophy 
in the Sasanian and ‘Abbasid successor-states of a Selcucid Greek 
Empire in 'Iraq and Iran, 5 had, like the cereal crops of Egypt, to wait for 

* Sec VI. vii. so, and pp. 443-4 and 586, below. * See VI. vii. 100-2. 

» After the liquidation of Hellenic rule south of the Taurus by the Primitive Muslim 
Arabs, a previously Ammonite 'Philadelphia' reverted to the name 'Amman. 

« Sec V. v. 38. 

* It is significant that, although the self-Hellcnization of the Syriac World east of 
the Euphrates did not reach its zenith until after the beginning of the 'Abbasid Age, and 



ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM 409 

its harvest till the subsidence of a fructifying but overwhelming flood 
had allowed the fertilized fields to show their faces again to the Sun. 

The extent to which the military conquests of Hellenic war-lords, 
imposing though these were, were outranged, in the Time-dimension as 
well as in the Space-dimension, by the pacific radiation of the Hellenic 
culture is revealed by a comparative survey of the expansion of Hellen¬ 
ism on these two different planes. 

Though the energy, man-power, and technique which the Hellenic 
Society diverted to the military conquest of its neighbours was a mere 
residue left over from the military resources that it was generating and 
expending in the chronic pursuit of fratricidal civil wars, 1 the first im- 


although the ‘Abbasid Caliphate embraced Syria and Egypt as well as ‘Iriq, Iran, and 
the Oxus-Jaxai.es Basin, the sources from which the Syriac-speaking and Arabic- 
speaking Hellenists of the 'Abbasid Age drew their draughts of Hellenic culture were 
not Alexandria or Antioch or any other focus of Hellenism in Syriac territories west of 
the Euphrates which had been under Hellenic rule for nearly a thousand years, but were 
Jund-i-ShapOr in Khuzistan, on the south-eastern fringe of the Tigris-Euphrates Basin, 
and the oasis of Merv on the south-western fringe of the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin (sec 
O’Leary, de L.: How Greek Science Parsed to the Arabs (London 1948, Kegan Paul), 

C P- 95 . 96 . 117. and 155). A political explanation of this apparent cultural paradox may 
: found in the fact that in Margiana and Susiana Hellenic rule had lasted less than two 
hundred years, instead of more than nine hundred, and had long since ceased to be re¬ 
membered, and by the same token ceased to be resented, by the sixth century of the 
Christian Era, when Khusru Anuahirwan ( imperabat a.d. 531-79) founded at Jund-i- 
ShSpur a school of Hellenic medicine and philosophy on the pattern of the school of 
Alexandria. 

Jund-i-ShapOr was selected by Anushirwan for this purpose because it had been an 
Hellenic city and a home of Aristotelian studies; but its Greek population had been the 
monument of an Hellenic military defeat, not of an Hellenic victory. They had been 

E risoners-of-war and civilian deportees who had been planted there by the Sasanian 
mperor Shfipur I ( imperabat a.d. 241-72) after his capture of the Roman Emperor 
Valerian and conquest of the Syrian metropolis Antioch-on-Orontes in a.d. 260—in 
contrast to the former Greek population of the by then no doubt already extinct Hellenic 
city-state Seleucia-on-Eulacus (sec Tam, W. W.: The Greeks in Bactria and India 
(Cambridge 1938, University Press), p. 18), which, like all cities of that name, had been 
founded by the Sclcucidac, and whose Greek citizens, in their day, had been, not 
'displaced persons’, but an ‘ascendancy’ dominating the native inhabitants of the ci- 
devant Achaemenian imperial city of Susa. The deportees who had brought the study 
of Aristotle to Jund-i-Shipur from Antioch-on-Orontes in the third century of the 
Christian Era had presumably been Greek-speaking, or at any rate bilingual; but, 
whatever the original standing of the Greek language at Jund-i-Shipur may have been, 
Syriac came to prevail there as the linguistic medium for Science as well as for the affairs 
of everyday life (see O’Leary, op. cit.. p. 71). 

It is also significant that, in the self-Hellcnization of the Syriac World in the ‘Abbasid 
Age, an important part was played by the fossilized remnant of an elsewhere extinct 
Babylonic culture that survived at Martin in North-Western Mesopotamia (see Sweet- 
man, J. W.: Islam and Christian Theology, Part I, vol. i (London J945, Lutterworth 
Press), pp. 84-85; O’Leary, op. cit., pp. 171-5)- One of the most eminent of the ninth- 
century translators of Greek works into Arabic was the Harrani Thabit b. Qurri, who 
was excommunicated and banished by the pagan high priest of Harrin but nevertheless 
remained faithful to his ancestral religion—though his loyalty to it cost him his post of 
physician to the Caliph Qihir ( imperabat a.d. 932-4). The Martinis were particularly 
well qualified for serving as interpreters of Hellenism to the Syriac World because a very 
strong tincture of Hellenism had been infused into their own Babylonic culture (see 
Sweetman, op. cit., pp. 84-85; O’Leary, op. cit., p. 172). This syncretism was the fruit 
of an attitude of receptivity towards the Hellenic culture; and this receptivity, in 
its turn, was the fruit of an entente eordiale between the Babylonic subjects and the 
Macedonian destroyers of the Achaemenian Empire. The religious and intellectual 
leaders of the Babylonic Society had seen in Alexander the Great a liberator from an 
alien yoke which had become an agency for the encroachment of the Syriac language 
and culture upon the Babylonic Society’s domain (see V. v. 94 and 123); and, under 
a subsequent easy-going Sclcucid regime, the peasantry of Babylonia had not been 
alienated by being made the victims of a Ptolemaic exploitation. 

1 Sec III. iii. 138-40 and 149-50. »nd p. 437, below. 



4io ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

pact of the Alexandrine Hellenic war-machine was shattering, and in 
the sequel its final recoil was delayed no less than twice by a fresh career 
of conquest which disappointed the hopes of adversaries who had rashly 
ventured to try conclusions again with an aggressor whose martial 
energy had delusively appeared to be flagging. 

The overwhelming psychological effect produced by Alexander’s 
astonishing feat of overthrowing the Achaemenian Empire in five years 1 
is attested by the passivity of the conquered populations during the 
fratricidal wars for the division of the spoils which Alexander’s Mace¬ 
donian successors continued to wage against one another for forty years 
(321-281 b.C.) after Alexander’s death 2 with the same impunity as the 
Arab conquerors of the Roman and Sasanian empires a thousand years 
later, after the death of the Caliph ‘Uthman, and the Spanish conquerors 
of the Andean Empire of the Incas in the sixteenth century of the 
Christian Era. 3 This diversion of the conquerors’ efforts to the task of 
self-destruction did, indeed, save the independence of the former pro¬ 
vinces of the Achaemenian Empire, from Bithynia to Azerbaijan inclu¬ 
sive, which had happened to lie beyond striking distance of Alexander’s 
left wing on his march from the Hellespont to the Caspian Gates; but, of 
all the territories that Alexander had overrun, the Indus Valley alone 
escaped from his successors’ grasp; and this was an ex-Achaemenian 
territory which had thrown off the Achaemenian yoke long before 
Alexander’s advent. No appreciable portion of Alexander’s conquests 
that had been acquired by him direct from the Achaemenian Empire 
was lost by his successors till the Parnian Nomads from Transcaspia 
took possession of the Seleucids’ province Parthia about half way 
through the third centuiy B.C.; 4 and, after that, circa 183 B.C., the ruler 
of a Greek principality in the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin, whose communica¬ 
tions with the heart of the Hellenic World had been cut by the Parnians’ 
intrusion, was nevertheless able to muster the military strength to cross 
the Hindu Kush and overrun the vast domain of a broken-down 
Mauryan Empire, from the Panjab to Sind and Bengal. 

This stroke might have added the whole of India to the territories 
under Hellenic rule, if the new prize had not evoked a new round of 
fratricidal wars for the division of the spoils between Greek and Greek. 
Yet neither the conquest of the Bactrian Greek conqueror of India’s 
base of operations north-west of the Hindu Kush in 168-7 B.C. by 
a rival Greek war-lord who was perhaps the leader of a Seleucid expedi¬ 
tionary force 5 nor the subsequent conquest of the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin 


* See II. ii. 139. 

* See XI. i*. 260-7:. 

J The proneness of *lien conquerors of universal states to turn their arms against 
one another has been noticed in IV. iv. 4S4-6. 

* Perhaps the only exception was the fringe of cx-Achaemenian territory along the 
eastern edge of the Iranian Plateau which Seleucus I Nicator ceded, circa 303 B.C., 
together with his claims to the already lost Indus Basin, to the founder of the Mauryan 
Empire, Chandragupta, in exchange for five hundred war-elephants for use in Seleucus's 
wars against his Macedonian rivals (sec Smith, V. A.: The Early History 0/ India, 3rd 
ed. (Oxford 1014, Clarendon Press), p. 119; Tam, W. W.: The Greeks in Bactria and 
India (Cambridge J938, University Press), p. :oo). 

s For this account of Eucratidas. sec Tarn, W. W.: The Greeks in Bactria and India 
(Cambridge 1938, University Press), pp. 186-2:6. 



ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM 411 

by the Yuechi Nomads between 141 and 128 B.c. 1 prevented the Greeks 
from clinging to part of Demetrius’s Indian conquests. Greek rule 
lingered on south-east of the Hindu Kush till after 32 b.c. 2 and thus 
perhaps just overlapped in time with the establishment of an Hellenic 
universal state round the coasts of the Mediterranean in the shape of the 
Roman Empire. In conquering a Carthaginian Empire which had 
successfully foiled the efforts of all previous Hellenic aggressors to break 
into the Syriac Society’s colonial domain in the western basin of the 
Mediterranean, the Romans had emulated in the west the eastward 
conquests of Alexander the Great and Demetrius; and, when the Romans 
subsequently marched eastward in turn in Alexander’s footsteps, they 
brought the Orientals’ first military counter-offensive to a halt in the 
last century b.c. and postponed the final liquidation of Hellenic rule 
south-east of Taurus for another seven hundred years. 

Before the tide of war was thus turned again in the Hellenic Society’s 
favour by Roman force of arms, the Oriental counter-offensive had 
gone far. A westward expansion of the Parthian Power from the Caspian 
Gates to the east bank of the Middle Euphrates, which was maintained 
against successive Selcucid attempts to push the Parthians back between 
140 and 129 B.C., had ham-strung the Seleucid Power by depriving it 
of its granary in Babylonia. The surviving remnant of a Macedonian 
successor-state of the Achaemenian Empire whose rule had once ex¬ 
tended from the Aegean to the Pamirs was snuffed out when the Seleucid 
capital, Antioch-on-Orontes, was occupied in 83 B.c. by Tigranes, the 
king of the Seleucid Power’s parvenu Armenian successor-state. In 
87-86 B.c. the soldiers of Mithradates Eupator, the king of the Achae¬ 
menian Empire’s never conquered Pontic Cappadocian successor-state, 
had carried Oriental arms as far into Continental European Greece as 
the Achaemenid Emperor Xerxes had penetrated in 480-479 B.c. 3 And 
these territorial gains by independent Oriental Powers at the Hellenic 
Powers’ expense, extensive though they had been, had not been so 
ominous as the internal revolts of previously passive subject Oriental 
populations. As early as the turn of the third and second centuries B.c. 
the Ptolemaic Power had been shaken in its Egyptian citadel by the 
mutinousness of Egyptian fallahtn whom the Ptolemaic Government 
had rashly converted from peasants into soldiers at a crisis in one of the 
fratricidal wars between the Ptolemaic and Seleucid Greek empires; 
and thereafter, in 166 b.c., the hillmen of Judaea had successfully 
revolted against a Seleucid regime which had annexed the Ptolemies’ 
Syrian possessions at the opening of the century’ without taking over the 
Ptolemies’ prudent policy of cultural laisser-faire . 4 

This wave of Oriental militancy was broken by a counter-wave of 
Roman conquest and empire-building in the East. Between 74 and 62 
b.c. successive Roman expeditionary forces led by Lucullus and Pompcy 
subjugated successor-states of the Achaemenian Empire in Northern 
and North-Eastern Anatolia, from Bithynia to Pontus inclusive, which 

1 See Tam, op. cit, p. 277. 

* See ibid., p. 343. 3 Sec I. i. 76, n. 1. 

* This native insurrection against Ptolemaic and Seleucid rule in Egypt and Judaea 
in the second century b.c. hss been noticed in V. v. 68. 



4X2 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
had never been conquered by Alexander or by any of his Macedonian 
successors; Antioch-on-Orontes, with the rest of the former metropolitan 
territory of the Seleucid Monarchy in Northern Syria, was wrested out 
of Tigranes’ hands; and the line of the Middle Euphrates' was selected 
by Pompey to serve as the eastern military and political frontier of an 
Hellenic World which had now been taken under Rome’s aegis. When 
the chill shadow of Roman military power thus descended on the cx- 
Achaemenian territories west of Euphrates, an Egyptian peasantry who 
had been taking advantage of the relaxation of the Ptolemies’ grip were 
sufficiently sensitive to this fresh change in the local political climate to 
relapse into their customary sullen submissiveness for the next five 
centuries, till the Monophysitc Movement gave them their opportunity, 
in the fifth and sixth centuries of the Christian Era, to resume their 
revolt against Hellenism by defying a Roman regime which was then at 
last beginning to go the way of its Ptolemaic predecessor. The Jews, who 
were perhaps more passionate, though not more fanatical or more 
stubborn, than their Egyptian fellow victims, wilfully blinded them¬ 
selves to the signs of the times 2 and brought destruction upon their 
metropolitan community in Judaea by three times challenging the 
Romans to ordeal by battle between a.d. 66 and a.d. 135. 3 

Nor did the Roman counter-offensive against the independent 
Oriental Powers come to a permanent standstill at the Pompeian line 
along the Middle Euphrates, notwithstanding Crassus’s disastrous failure 
in 53 B.c. to conquer the Parthian Empire of the Arsacidac, and 
Trajan’s all but disastrous repetition of Crassus’s ambitious enterprise 
in a.d. 114-17. Augustus’s more modest forward move of asserting 
Rome’s suzerainty over Armenia in 20 b.c. had more lasting effects, and 
the obstinate unwillingness of the Arsacidae and their Sasanid successors 
to reconcile themselves to this unpalatable fait accompli beyond their 
northern borders eventually provoked successive eastward advances of a 
Roman frontier which Trajan’s successor Hadrian had withdrawn again 
to Pompcy’s Euphratean line from Trajan’s outposts at the foot of the 
Zagros and the head of the Persian Gulf. The southern frontier of 
Rome’s Armenian protectorate was progressively screened against 
attack or infiltration from a base of hostile operations in Babylonia by 
Marcus Aurelius’s annexation of Osrhocnc in a.d. 166 and Septimius 
Scverus’s annexation of the rest of Northern Mesopotamia, up to the 
line of the River Khabur, in a.d. 194-9. Even after these cumulative 
failures to stand up to Rome had cost the Arsacids their throne in a.d. 
224, and after the ensuing bout of anarchy by which the Roman Empire 
was convulsed between a.d. 235 and a.d. 284 had given the Arsacids’ 
militant Sasanid successors a unique opportunity to show their mettle, 
the first trial of strength between an old Roman and a new Sasanian 
Power ended humiliatingly for the Sasanidae in a further eastward 
extension of the cordon of Roman territory along the southern frontier 
of Armenia through the annexation to the Roman Empire of five districts 
cast of the Tigris in a.d. 296. 

Indeed, during the four centuries of its existence, the Sasanian Power 

« See p. 358, n. 2, above. 2 Sec V. v. 390, n. 3. J See V. v. 68. 



ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM 413 
showed itself impotent to fulfil its raison d'etre by completing a liquida¬ 
tion of Hellenic rule in the former domain of the Achacmenian Empire 
which the Sasanids’ Arsacid predecessors had so nearly accomplished in 
the second century b.c. The Sasanids’ permanent achievements went no 
farther than the recovery of the five districts east of Tigris and the 
Mesopotamian frontier fortress of Nisibis in a . d . 363 and the acquisi¬ 
tion of the lion’s share of Armenia when, circa a . d . 387 - 90 ,' the Roman 
Imperial Government freed its hands for grappling with a threat to its 
existence on the Danube by consenting to the partition of this long- 
disputed buffer-state beyond the Euphrates. Even the last and most 
devastating of the Romano-Persian wars ( gerebatur a . d . 603 - 28 ) ended 
in a peace of exhaustion on the basis of the status quo ante bellum ; and, in 
bleeding his empire white for the sake of seeing his outposts temporarily 
occupy Calchcdon and Tripolitania, Khusru II Parwlz was merely open¬ 
ing the door and showing the way to Arab tertii gatidentes. 

These Primitive Muslim Arab conquerors performed the last act in 
the drama of the Syriac World’s encounter with Hellenism on the 
military and political plane by finally liquidating Roman rule in Syria 
and Egypt and reconstituting in twelve campaigns ( gerebantur a . d . 632 - 
43 ) the Syriac universal state which it had taken Alexander five cam¬ 
paigns (gerebantur 334-330 b . c .) to destroy. 2 Thus the end of an Hellenic 
military ascendancy which had endured for 973 years in the ex- 
Achaemenian provinces west of the Euphrates was as swift and conclu¬ 
sive as its original imposition had been. But the spectacle on this military 
plane gives only a superficial and misleading impression of the true 
course of the encounter; for, as we have already observed, Alexander 
and his Macedonian and Roman successors, in compelling their Oriental 
victims to submit to the force of Hellenic arms, had provoked them into 
steeling their hearts and minds against the reception of the Hellenic cul¬ 
ture; and, after these Hellenic men of war had done their obstructive 
work, an Hippocrates and an Aristotle had still to wait patiently for 
centuries on the threshold of a closed academic door which no military 
weapon could prise open to give them entry. The Syriac World did not 
begin to show a spontaneous interest in Hellenic science and philosophy 
till it had begun to shake itself loose from Hellenic domination by provid¬ 
ing itself with a Christianity of its own in the shape of the Nestorian and 
Monophysite heresies and with a literary medium of its own in the shape 
of the Syriac language; and the door thus at last set ajar was not opened 
w ide till after the Arabs had pushed the Romans back beyond the Taurus 
and had brought with them the Arabic language as an alternative medium 
to the Syriac. If any credit is to be given to any men-at-arms for the 
belated self-Hellenization of Syriac minds, we must conclude that the 
military pioneers who cleared the way for these minds’ reception of 


! According to Chmtemen, A.: L Iran soui let Satsamdet (Copenhagen 1936, Levin 
and Munksgaard), p. 248, the partition was carried out early in the reign of Vahram IV 
(regnabat cither a.d. 388-90 or a.d. 386-97). According to J. B. Bury, in his editio minor 
of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, vol. iii 
(London 1901, Methuen), p. 504, the negotiator of the partition on the Roman side was 
Theodosius I {imperabat a.d. 379-93)- 


4 X 4 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
the Hellenic culture were not an Alexander or a Pompey but were a 
Khalid b. al-Walid and a S'ad b. abl Waqqas. 

The success of the Nestorian and Monophysite movements in achiev¬ 
ing by non-military means, before the advent of the Muslim Arab 
warriors, so much more for the liberation of the Syriac World than had 
ever been accomplished by the Maccabees or the Sasanidae, is an 
exemplification, in the experience of the Hellenic Society’s victims, of a 
fundamental law governing the histories of encounters between societies 
which has been put in classical form, in terms of Hellenic experience, 
in Horace’s celebrated epigram Graecia capta ferum victorem cepit et 
artes intulit agresti Latio Hellenes and Orientals alike achieved cultural 
conquests as a result of having fallen into military and political adversity; 
and the Hellcnization of the Latin-speaking barbarians of Central Italy 
through the gentle influence of conquered Greek city-states in Campania 
and Magna Graecia was not the earliest instance of this phenomenon in 
Hellenic history. The Greek-speaking barbarians of Macedonia and 
Epirus were being Hellenized in the same age through the forcible in¬ 
corporation of a Chalcidice and an Ambracia into their Homerically 
adolescent bodies politic; 2 and, more than two hundred years earlier 
than that, the forcible incorporation of the Greek city-states along the 
western seaboard of Anatolia into the barbarian kingdom of Lydia had 
made a Philhcllene out of a Croesus who had come to the throne at 
Sardis as the leader of an anti-Hellenic party. 1 

In the Hellenic Civilization’s encounter with its Syriac sister society 
the fitful imposition of Carthaginian rule upon Greek city-states in 
Western Sicily over a period of a century and a half, beginning with the 
launching of the great Carthaginian offensive in 409 B.c. and ending in 
the outbreak of the First Romano-Punic War in 263 b.c., probably did 
more to Hellenize the Syriac Society’s colonial domain in the western 
basin of the Mediterranean than the subsequent Hellenic conquest and 
colonization of the Carthaginian Empire by the Hellenic Civilization’s 
Roman converts. In Anatolia in the last century B.c. a Mithradatcs 
Eupator, who emulated Xerxes in boasting of a Persian pedigree as well 
as in carrying his arms into European Greece, was at the same time 
proud to account himself a Philhcllene; and the source of the Hellenism 
which had captivated this Oriental war-lord of a Pontic Cappadocia that 
had escaped Macedonian conquest was not an imperial Pella or Antioch; 
it was a subject Sinope which had been annexed by Eupator’s grand¬ 
father Pharnaces circa 183 b.c. and had been chosen by Eupator himself 
to be the maritime Greek capital of his motley dominions 4 in place of a 

« Horace: Epistulae, Book II, Ep.i, II. 156-7. 

* See III. iii. 477-89. 

1 Sec Herodotus, Book I, chap. 92. 

* The Pontic Greek city-state that was thus forcibly honoured by Persian sovereigns 
of the Cappadocian hinterland, who belonged to the post-AIexandrine dynasty founded 
by the ex-satrap Ariarathes, had previously been paid the same two-edged compliment 
by Datames, the moving spirit in the revolt of the western satraps against the Achae- 
menian Imperial Government in 367 B.C. Before embarking on this abortive attempt to 
carve out a Cappadocian successor-state of the Achnemenun Empire for himself, the 
ambitious Carian empire-builder had occupied Sinope and made it the capital of his 
ephemeral principality (see Olmstead, A. T.: History of the Persian Empire (Chicago 
1948, University of Chicago Press), p. 412). 


ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM 415 
landlocked native city of Amasia 1 * that was hallowed by the rock-cut 
tombs of Eupator’s Persian ancestors. Nor was the cultural radiation of 
this subjugated colonial Greek city-state Sinope confined within the 
frontiers of the Oriental kingdom which had incorporated Sinope in its 
body politic. Across the breadth of Pontic Cappadocia the hinterland of 
Sinope expanded inland into the adjoining sister Cappadocian successor- 
state of the Achaemenian Empire in the interior of Eastern Anatolia; 
and by the fourth century of the Christian Era the cumulative cultural 
effect of an Hellenic influence which since Augustus’s day had been play¬ 
ing upon Cappadocia, not only from Sinope, but from a more powerful 
though still more distant transmitting station at Ephesus, 1 had inspired 
descendants of Persian feudal barons planted in Cappadocia in the 
Achaemenian Age 3 to become the Attic-educated Cappadocian Fathers 
of an Eastern Orthodox Christian Church. 

These instances of cultural attraction exercised on barbarian, Syriac, 
and Hittite hinterlands by politically subjugated maritime Hellenic city- 
states give the same evidence as the role subsequently played by the 
Hellenic deportee-settlement at Jund-i-Sh 3 pGr in the self-Hellcnization 
of the Syriac World after the final liquidation of Hellenic rule on Syriac 
ground. They testify to the operation of a social ‘law’ to the effect that, 
in cultural encounters between contemporaries, the sensitiveness of the 
receptivity of the heirs of an assaulted culture to the influence of an 
impinging culture is apt to be in inverse ratio to the degree to which the 
representatives of the impinging culture yield to the temptation of trying 
to force an entry. 

This law is likewise revealed in the history of the radiation of Hellenic 
art, which travelled farther afield than Hellenic science or philosophy, 
and much farther afield than Hellenic arms. An Hellenic Kingdom of 
Macedon whose soldiers once marched eastward as far as the Panjab 
never succeeded in permanently establishing its dominion over the 
headwaters of its domestic rivers Axius and Strymon; yet the image and 
superscription of coins minted in the Lower Strymon Basirt by Philip 
the son of Amyntas in the fourth century B.c. had made their way before 
the beginning of the Christian Era not only across the watershed between 
Strymon and Danube but right across the Continent and over the 
Channel into Britain. 4 Some four hundred years after Philip’s day, the 
peacefully triumphal north-westward progress of his coin-types was 
overtaken in Britain by the advance of the military frontier of a Roman- 
built Hellenic universal state; but in the opposite direction the radiation 

1 The writer of this Study spent the night of the 7th November, 1948, in Amasiaand 
visited the royal tombs rn route for the summit of the citadel. 

* See the passage in Strabo’s Geographica, Book XII, chap, ii, § to (c 54°). quoted in 
IV. iv. 21, n. 2. The expanding commercial and cultural hinterlands of rival ports behave 
like the expanding basins of rival rivers. Like a river, a port will capture territory from 
a competitor by pushing back the commercial watershed and thereby diverting the flow 
of trade from its rival to itself; but, unlike a river basin, in which the flow of water is in 
one direction only—from the headwaters to the sea—the hinterland of a port is the field 
of a two-way commercial and cultural traffic with an upward flow from coast to water¬ 
shed as well as a downward flow from watershed to coast. 

* See VI. vii. 123-4. 

4 See V. v. 196-8 and 482. The Philippan prototype did, however, 'suffer a sea change’ 
in the course of its journey to a British Ultima Thule. 



4 i6 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
of Hellenic art far outshot the farthest reconnaissance of Alexander’s 
or even Demetrius’s expeditionary force. After travelling eastward, in 
the wake of Hellenic arms, from the Aegean to Gandhara, on the water¬ 
shed between the Oxus and the Indus, and establishing a new base of 
pacific operations here under the aegis of Kushan barbarian successors 
of Bactrian Greek war-lords, Hellenic art made a further and still longer 
journey eastward from this second starting-point into a Sinic World into 
which neither Greek nor Roman armies had ever penetrated, to become 
the inspiration of the new art of a nascent Far Eastern Civilization. 1 

The Epiphany of Higher Religions 

The peaceful penetration of the Hellenic culture into regions never 
trodden by Hellenic conquerors even at the high tide of Hellenic military 
expansion teaches the same lesson as Hellenism’s posthumous artistic 
and intellectual triumphs after the ebb of its dominion from territories 
that Hellenic war-lords had once overrun and subjugated; and this 
Hellenic lesson is illuminating for the general study of encounters 
between civilizations that are one another’s contemporaries. That light 
was visible to students of history in the generation of the writer of this 
Study owing to the accident of their happening in this Hellenic case to 
know the whole story—in contrast to the state of their knowledge of 
current encounters with the Modern Western Civilization, in which a 
flood of detailed information out of all proportion to the meagre surviv¬ 
ing records of Hellenic history was abruptly cut short, in the middle of 
the story, by the iron curtain of Man’s insuperable ignorance of a still 
uncreated future. 

Whether the impotence of force in the cultural commerce between 
contemporaries was one day to be illustrated in Modern Western history 
as it had already been revealed in post-Alcxandrine Hellenic history was 
a question that was still enigmatic in a.d. 1952; and this negative result 
of a study of the encounters between his own society and its contem¬ 
poraries served to remind the Modern Western student of History that 
those historical events that for him were the least remote, the best 
documented, the most alive, and the most familiar were also therefore 
the least illuminating for the purpose of his ultimate inquiry into the 
general course and character of human affairs. 2 The more remote and 
less fully documented history of encounters with an Hellenic Society, 
which had become extinct not much less than thirteen hundred years 
before the mid-twentieth-century student’s day, promised to teach him 
more about the comparative effects, in encounters between contempor¬ 
aries, of the alternative tempers of violence and gentleness, and a 
fortiori more about the outcome of such encounters on the religious 
plane. 

To a twentieth-century Western historian, looking back from his 
historical vantage-point upon the long since completed history of 
encounters with a post-Alexandrine Hellenism, it was evident that by 
his day the spontaneous reception of Hellenic art in a fifth-century Sinic 

1 See III. iii. 131 nnd 247. n. 2, and V. v. 134-j;. *q 6. and 482-3. 

2 This point has already been noticed in 1 . 1. 30-37, and on p. 346 above. 



ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM 417 

World and of Hellenic science and philosophy in a ninth-century Syriac 
World had gone the same way as the feats of Macedonian and Roman 
arms during the last four centuries b.c. The artistic and intellectual, like 
the military and political, transactions between a post-Alexandrine 
Hellenism and its contemporaries were by this time a closed account 
that was having no continuing effect on transactions in the twentieth- 
century observer’s own age; but this was not to say that the life of 
Mankind in the twentieth century of the Christian Era was not being 
influenced at all by any effects of a post-Alexandrine Hellenism’s impact 
on the world of its day. The continuing operation of this impact was 
proclaimed in a twentieth-century world by the allegiance of an over¬ 
whelming majority of the living generation of Mankind to one or other 
of four living religions—Christianity, Islam, the Mahayana, and Hindu¬ 
ism—whose historical epiphanies could be traced back to episodes in 
a now extinct Hellenism’s encounters with now extinct Oriental civiliza¬ 
tions; and, if the future course of human affairs were to vindicate an 
intuition 1 that the ‘universal churches’ embodying the ‘higher religions’ 
were not merely the latest type of human society that had made its 
appearance up to date but were also an apter vehicle than either civiliza¬ 
tions or primitive societies for helping human beings to make their 
pilgrim’s progress towards the goal of human endeavours, it would 
follow that the encounters with a post-Alexandrine Hellenism shed a 
light which the encounters with a Modern Western Civilization did not 
shed upon the main theme of any general study of History. 

When we surveyed the religious effects of the literally world-wide 
impact of a Modern Western Civilization, we met with little evidence 
here of the genesis of new higher religions comparable to those en¬ 
gendered by the virtually world-wide impact of a post-Alexandrine 
Hellenism. In the history of encounters with the Modern Western 
Civilization up to date, new higher religions, if discernible at all, proved 
to be conspicuously rare and rudimentary; 1 and we did not find any 
warrant for allowing ourselves to guess that this apparent religious 
barrenness of a Modern Western internal proletariat might be an illusion, 
arising from the prematurencss of our date of observation, which might 
be dispelled by contrary evidence in still unwritten chapters of the story. 1 
On this showing, we must conclude that, if the encounters between our 
own Western Civilization and its contemporaries had been the only 
instances known to us of encounters between contemporaries, we should 
have remained ignorant of the most enduring and most significant of all 
the effects which such encounters had once produced; and we must also 
admit the possibility that the darkness of our understanding of History 
would not be appreciably lightened even if we could live to read the 
remaining chapters of the Modern Western story, and if the information 
at Posterity’s disposal in these still outstanding chapters should prove 
to be as abundant as in the chapters already in print. By contrast, our 
fragmentary record of the story of encounters with a post-Alexandrine 
Hellenism initiates us into the epiphany of a band of higher religions 4 — 

* See VII. vii. 420-3. * See V. v. 174-6. 

> See VII. vii. 414-19. * Sec V. v. 81-82, and xi, map 29. 


P 



4 iS ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
the worship of Isis, the worships of Cybele and Iuppitcr Dolichcnus, 
Mithraism and Christianity and Islam, the Mahayana and Hinduism— 
which incidentally bear witness to Hellenism’s encounters with a 
petrified Egyptiac, a fossilized I Iittite, a Syriac, and an Indie Civilization, 
though the revelation that is these higher religions’ message is concerned, 
not with the final cause of the species of human society called ‘civiliza¬ 
tions’, but with the will of God and with the goal of human endeavours. 

The ecclesiastical institutions in which these higher religions had 
come to be embodied had behaved like all human institutions in com¬ 
peting with one another; and, in this competition, all but the four last 
on our list had ostensibly succumbed; but in truth these apparently 
extinguished competitors were still living on in the life of victors who 
had triumphed over them by taking over from them their distinctive 
sparks of truth and life. For those who had eyes to see, a Mithraic vein 
was discernible in the catholic tradition of a triumphant Mahayana, 
and a Mithraic, Isiac, and Cybeline vein in the catholic tradition of a 
triumphant Christianity. Unlike the military, political, intellectual, 
and artistic offspring of a post-Alexandrine Hellenism’s encounters with 
contemporary societies of its own species, the higher religions that had 
made their epiphany in the course of those encounters were thus all still 
alive and at work in a twentieth-century world that had been unified on 
the technological plane by the ubiquitous expansion of a secular Modern 
Western culture. 

2. Encounters toith the Pre-Alexandrine Hellenic Civilization 1 
The Hellenic Society's Offensive in the Mediterranean Basin 

The drama in which a pre-Alexandrine Hellenic Society was the 
protagonist was performed in the same Mediterranean theatre that, 
some eighteen hundred years later, was to be the scene of a play in 
which a Medieval Western Christendom was to take the principal part; 
and in both performances there were three actors on the stage. The two 
rivals of a pre-Alexandrine Hellenism were the sister Syriac Society and 
the fossilized remnant of a prematurely shattered Hittite Society which 
had preserved its existence in the fastnesses of the Taurus. In the 
competition between these three parties for the dominion of the Mediter¬ 
ranean Basin the Syriac Civilization was represented by the Phoenicians 
and the Hittite by seafarers who, in the overseas territories in which they 
won a footing, became known in Greek as Tyrrhenians and in Latin as 
Etruscans to their Hellenic adversaries. 2 

In this three-cornered contest, which opened in the eighth century 
b.c., the prizes were the shores of the Western Basin of the Mediter¬ 
ranean, whose culturally backward native inhabitants were no match for 
any of the three rival intruding societies; the shores of the Black Sea 
opening on to the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe, which 
gave access in turn to the arable belt of Black Earth along the Steppe’s 
north-western fringe; and the long-since intensively cultivated land of 


1 See xi, maps 18, 19, 20, 21. 


J Sec I. i. 114 and II. ii. 85-86. 



ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM . 419 

Egypt, where a civilization that had suffered the doom of Tithonus 1 had 
reached by this time a stage of decrepitude in its state of living death at 
which it could no longer keep one aggressive alien neighbour at bay 
without enlisting the services of another to bolster up its own failing 
strength. 

In the struggle for these prizes the pre-Alexandrine Hellenic Civiliza¬ 
tion enjoyed several notable advantages over both its competitors. 

Its most manifest advantage was geographical. The Hellenic base of 
operations in the Aegean was closer to the Western Mediterranean, and 
much closer to the Black Sea, than the Etruscan and Phoenician bases at 
the eastern extremity of the Mediterranean were to either of these two 
undeveloped maritime outlets for the Levant. Indeed, the Aegean 
homeland of Hellenism lay right across the sca-route to the Black Sea 
from the coasts of Cilicia and Syria, and it also commanded and 
threatened the right flank of the Etruscan and Phoenician sea-route to 
the West, whereas the Hellenes themselves could row straight from the 
Aegean into the Dardanelles and could make an easy coasting voyage 
from Corinth to Syracuse round the head of the Ionian Sea across the 
Straits of Otranto, without in either venture running the risk of being 
intercepted and attacked by their rivals. 

The pre-Alexandrine Hellenic Society’s second advantage in this 
competition lay in the head of population which it had accumulated as 
the result of a victory of the Lowlands over the Highlands in the preced¬ 
ing chapter of Hellenic history; 1 for the consequent pressure of popula¬ 
tion on the means of subsistence in Hellas gave the Hellenes’ expansion 
an explosive force and stimulated them to follow up the establishment 
of trading posts overseas by making this new world into a Magna 
Graccia through a rapid and intensive settlement of Hellenic agricultural 
colonists on the land. Our scanty evidence gives the impression that 
neither the Etruscans nor the Phoenicians had a comparable amount of 
man-power to dispose of in this age; and it is at any rate clear that 
neither of them in fact emulated the Hellenes’ achievement of making a 
new world their own by colonizing it. The cautious Phoenicians kept 
within the narrow bounds of their coastal trading-posts till the Cartha¬ 
ginians belatedly broke with Phoenician tradition by imposing their 
rule on the native population of their North-West African hinterland 
about half-way through the fifth century b.c. j The rash Etruscan settlers 
on the west coast of Italy pushed on into the interior across the Appen- 
nincs and into the Po Basin until lack of man-power brought their 
advance to a halt at the southern foot of the Alps and there drew down 
upon them the avalanche of a Celtic barbarian counter-attack. 4 

The third advantage enjoyed by the Hellenes was, like the first, a 

1 See VI. vii. 47-52. _ * See I. i. 24-25 and HI. iii. 120-1. 

3 Sec Meyer, £.: Gnchichte dei AUertums, vol. iii. Part I (Stuttgart 1901, Cotta), 
pp.681-2. 

* See II. ii. 85 and II. ii. 276, 280, and 345. In terms of the overseas expansion of a 
Modern Western World, the Greek settlements in Magna Graccia and Sicily may be 
compared to the English settlements along the Atlantic seaboard of North America; the 
Phoenician posts at key points in the Western Mediterranean to the Portuguese posts at 
key points in the Indian Ocean; and the Etruscan conquests in Italy to the Spanish 
conquests in Central and South America. 



420 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
corollary of their geographical situation. The opening of the competition 
between Etruscans, Phoenicians, and Hellenes in the Mediterranean in 
the eighth century b.c. happened to coincide in date with the inaugura¬ 
tion by the Assyrian war-lord Tiglath-Pileser III (regnabat 746-727 
b.c.) of the last and most devastating offensive in the third bout of 
Assyrian militarism in South-Western Asia; 1 and the homelands of the 
Phoenicians and Etruscans in Syria and South-Eastern Anatolia were 
immediately exposed to the full fury of an Assyrian tornado which left 
the homeland of the Hellenes in the Aegean unscathed. The surviving 
Hittite principalities astride the Taurus in South-Eastern Anatolia were 
annexed to the Assyrian dominions by Sargon (regnabat 722-705 b.c.); 
and, after the Aramaean principalities in the interior of Syria had been 
ground to powder, the maritime Phoenician city-states in their turn 
were scarified by the Assyrian harrow. Sidon was annexed to the 
Assyrian dominions in 677 B.C. and its former territory was converted 
into an Assyrian province. 2 * The Isle of Tyre was besieged by the 
Assyrians in 674-668 B.c., J and was probably annexed after the suppres¬ 
sion of a rebellion in 639-7 B.c. in the former Tyrian territory on the 
mainland. 4 Of the four metropolitan Phoenician city-states, only Byblus 
and Aradus retained their independence; 5 and their two conquered 
sisters were not compensated economically for their political subjuga¬ 
tion by finding themselves incorporated into a continental empire that 
extended eastwards from the coast of Syria into the interior of South- 
Western Asia over the crest of Zagros on to the western rim of the 
Iranian Plateau. Asshur’s South-West Asia, like Napoleon’s and like 
Hitler’s Europe, was too severely damaged in the making, too short-lived, 
and too incessantly mobilized for war ever to harvest the potential 
economic fruits of a violently enforced political unification. 

Considering these handicaps, it is remarkable that the Phoenicians 
and Etruscans should have done as well as they did in their maritime 
competition with the Hellenes. In the race for the Black Sea the 
geographical advantage was indeed so overwhelmingly on the Hellenes’ 
side that here their competitors were decisively defeated. Traces of a 
Phoenician settlement on the island of Thasos off the north shore of 
the Aegean, 6 and traces of Tyrrhenian settlements on the island of 
Lemnos, off the Aegean entrance to the Dardanelles, and at two points, 
inside the Dardanelles, on the Asiatic coast of the Sea of Marmara, 7 are 
evidence of a struggle in this arena which ended in a decisive and defini¬ 
tive Hellenic victory. The Black Sea became an Hellenic lake; and, in 

1 See IV. iv. 475-6. 

* Sec Forrcr, E.: Die Provimeinleilung dei Assyritchen Rtichtt (Leipzig 1920. Hin- 

richs), p. 65. 3 See ibid., p. 66. 

4 See ibid., pp. 66-67. * See ibid., p. 67. 

6 Talcs of ancient Phoenician settlements in the Hellenic Society’s eventual domain 

were, of course, commonplaces of Hellenic legend, and, in so far as they were to be 
credited at all, they were perhaps in most cases to be interpreted as echoes, in a post- 
Minoan folk-memory, of Minoan enterprise in an age before the dawn of Hellenic his¬ 
tory and long before the intrusion of any authentic Phoenicians into Hellenic waters. 
In Thasos, on the other hand, the genuineness of the talc of a Phoenician settlement seemed 
to be attested by the attachment of the Semitic name Cabeiri (‘the Great (GodsJ’j to 
divinities worshipped in an historic Thasian cult. 

7 Sec I. i. 114, n. 3, and I. i. 411-15. 



ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM 421 
the period of quiescence on the Steppe after the eruption of the Cim¬ 
merian and Scythian Nomads at the turn of the eighth and seventh 
centuries b.c., 1 the Hellenic masters of the Black Sea and the Scythian 
masters of the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe 2 entered into 
a profitable commercial partnership in which the cereal harvests raised 
by the Scythians’ sedentary subjects on the Black Earth were exported 
overseas to feed Hellenic urban populations in the Aegean in exchange 
for luxury goods of Hellenic manufacture designed to suit the Royal 
Scythians’ taste. 3 

In the Western Mediterranean, where the balance of geographical 
advantage was less heavily weighted in the Hellenes’ favour, the struggle 
lasted longer and went through many more vicissitudes before it ended, 
here too, in an Hellenic victory. 

In the first round in the eighth century B.c. both the Etruscans and 
the Phoenicians managed to forge ahead of the Hellenes, in spite of the 
greater distance of their Levantine bases from the western scene of 
operations and in defiance of the ever impending Hellenic threat to the 
right flank of their long-drawn-out line of maritime communications, 
where the route ran between Libya and Crete. The Etruscans must have 
slipped through the Straits of Messina to establish themselves along the 
west coast of Italy between the mouths of the Tiber and the Arno before 
the Hellenes had closed the Straits by planting the toe of Italy on one 
side and the western seaboard of Sicily on the other with a serried array 
of colonial Greek city-states. The Phoenicians succeeded in resisting 
all Hellenic attempts to wrest out of Phoenician hands a command 
of the wider maritime passage westward between Cape Bon and the 
western tip of Sicily, which Phoenician pioneers had brought under their 
control by planting a Sicilian outpost at Motye 4 over against North- 
West African outposts at Utica and Carthage. In the ensuing phases 
of the struggle the overseas Phoenicians and the overseas Tyrrhenians 
alike achieved a self-sufficiency that neutralized the advantage enjoyed 
by the Hellenes in holding the interior lines and discounted the loss 
that the Levantine seafarers suffered when the harrowing of their 
parent societies in South-West Asia by the Assyrians deprived them 
of all prospect of receiving any appreciable further reinforcements 
from home. 

The balance of advantage continued nevertheless to incline so heavily 
in the Hellenes’ favour that, throughout the seventh century B.c. and 
the first half of the sixth, they went from strength to strength. The 


* See III. iii. 410 and VI. vii.580-689. 

1 For the Scythian empire baaed on the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe, 
see III. iii. 25, n. 8, and 428-30. 

1 Sec III. iii. 429. In the Ions history of a Medieval Western Christendom’s ex¬ 
pansion over the Mediterranean Basin and its backwaters, the trade between the Greek 
settlements on the north shore of the Black Sea and the Royal Scythians had its counter¬ 
part in a trade between Venetian and Genoese settlements on the same coast and the 
Golden Horde. During the first phase of the Mamluk regime in Egypt, when the Mam- 
luks were importing their slave-successors from the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian 
Steppe and not, as in the second phase, from the Caucasus, the Venetians were the prin¬ 
cipal carriers of this valuable human freight. 

♦ They also planted two further posts, beyond the north-western comer of the island, 
at Panormus (Palermo) and Soloeis, towards the western end of the north coast. 



422 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
colonization of Cyrenaica in and after circa 639 B.c. 1 gave them a com¬ 
mand of the Libyan as well as the Cretan flank of the sea-passage 
between the Levant and the Western Mediterranean which might have 

E roved a decisive factor in the struggle if the overseas Phoenicians and 
truscans had not already learnt to dispense with support from their 
original bases of operations. The foundation in 580 b.c., on the grand 
scale, of the new colonial Greek city-state Akragas {Latinh Agrigentum) 
filled the last gap in a chain of Greek settlements along the south coast 
of Sicily which thenceforth stretched without a break from Syracuse to 
a Selinus that had been planted in 628 b.c. on the threshold of the 
Phoenician outpost at the island’s western tip. The foundation circa 
600 b.c. of Massilia (Marseilles)—on the brink of the nearest natural 
harbour to the delta of the Rh6ne that was out of range of the choking 
discharge of the delta-building silt—gave the Hellenes the command of 
the most magnificent of all the natural avenues leading from the shores 
of the Mediterranean into the interior of Europe. 2 The accidental dis¬ 
covery, circa 638 b.c., 3 by the Samian merchant-adventurer Colaeus, 
of the ‘at that time still virgin market' 4 of Tartessus (Tarshish), on the 
Iberian shore of the Mediterranean’s estuary into the Atlantic beyond 
the Straits of Gibraltar, promised to give the Hellenes a monopoly of 
trade with a source of mineral wealth that was a dazzling reward for their 
being some three-quarters of a century behind the Phoenician founders 
of Gades (Cadiz) in the long race from the Levant to the Pillars of 
Hercules. 

Even in the shorter race for Egypt, which was the one goal out of 
the three for which the maritime competitors were contending where the 
advantage of geographical proximity did not lie with the Hellenes, the 
seventh century saw the Hellenes carry off the prize. The Hellenes 
outstripped their rivals here likewise, in spite of their geographical 
handicap, because they were in a position to supply a now fanatically 
xenophobc Egyptiac Society with the one service that it was still 
willing perforce to purchase from alien hands. An Egypt that was up in 
arms against an atrocious Assyrian conqueror required alien mercenary 
troops to help it to shake off a yoke which it was too feeble to shake off 

, 1 ~, we fo,,0 , w Eusebius in dating the foundation of Cyrene itself circa 631 b.c., the 
first Theracan landing on the Libyan islet of Plates will have been made circa 639 b.c. 
according to the chronology given by Herodotus in Book IV, chaps. 156-8. 

1 The avenue from Marseilles ur> the courses of the Rh6ne and the Safine led direct 
to a g«p between the Jura and the Vosges that gave access to the upper valleys of both 
the Rhine and the Danube (see II. ii. 330). The only other river-route from the Mediter¬ 
ranean into the interior of Europe that could remotely compare with the Rh6ne Valiev 
avenue was the route up the Vardar (Gratei Axius) and down the Morava iLatini 
Margus) to the south bank of the Middle Danube above the Iron Gates, adjoining the 
south-east comer of the AlfOld. This route, which, in the first generation of Alexander's 
successors, was to be provided, by Cassander’s insight, with an adequate port through 
his foundation of Thcssalomca, was inadequately served in the prc-Alcxandrine Age 
by the more securely but less conveniently situated Greek colonial settlements at Olyn- 
thus and Methone. Compared with the open roads up the valleys of the Rhfine and the 
vardar, the Alpine portages into the Danube Basin from the head of the Adriatic were 
arduous, though they were sufficiently convenient to make the successive fortunes of 
Aquilcia, Venice, and Trieste. 

of Plates dalC W * S " fCW m0n,h * “ fter ,he Thcracan *’ landing on the Libyan island 
4 T ° aWpto* 1 roCro fjv atcf)parov roGrov rov xpovov.—Herodotus, Book IV, chap. 


ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM 423 

by its own exertions; and a role which the Egyptians' Anatolian 
and Syrian fellow victims of Assyrian militarism were powerless to 
play, even if they had had the will, was left to Ionian and Carian 
‘brazen men’ from the sea whom the Pharaoh-Liberator Psammetichus 
I (regnabat 663/655-610 B.c. 1 ) enlisted for the task of expelling the 
Assyrian garrisons from the Lower Nile Valley in the years 658-651 B.c. 2 

Towards the middle of the sixth century b.c. it looked as if the 
Hellenes had not only won their maritime competition for the Mediter¬ 
ranean Basin with the Etruscans and Phoenicians but were now also in 
a fair way to inheriting the Assyrians' continental empire in Egypt and 
South-West Asia. Circa 696 b.c., nearly half a century before Psam- 
metichus’s Hellenic mercenaries turned the Assyrians out of Egypt, 
Sennacherib had been incensed by an audacious insurrection of inter¬ 
loping Hellenic ‘brazen men’ from the sea on the Cilician 3 coast of his 
dominions; and it looks as if the Assyrian Empire’s Neo-Babylonian 
successor-state followed the example of its Egyptian successor-state in 
hiring Hellenic fighting-men, if we may assume that other Hellenic 
soldiers of fortune served in Nebuchadnezzar’s bodyguard besides a 
Lesbian Antimenidas whose name and record happen to have been saved 
from oblivion by the accident of his having been a brother of the poet 
Alcaeus. 

The Syriac Society’s Political Consolidation for Self-Defence 

This employment of Hellenic troops in a South-West Asian Empire 
whose native Chaldacan warriors were far better military material than 
the drones of Libyan descent, who were doing duty for a native military 
caste in a contemporary Egypt, 4 was an augury of a future Hellenic 
ascendancy over a fallen Assyrian Empire’s former domain; and indeed 
the Hellenes’ footing in Egypt and South-West Asia on the eve of the 
establishment of the Achaemenian Empire was not less favourable than 
their footing there on the eve of the Achaemenian Empire’s fall some 
two hundred years later, when Hellenic mercenaries were not only once 
more the mainstay of a once more precariously independent Egypt, but 
were also being employed by loyal as well as by rebel Persian provincial 
governors and even by the Achaemenian Emperor himself. In the fourth 

1 Psammetichus was installed as vassal prince of Lower Egypt by Asshurbanipal in 
663 B.C. and had established his authority over Thebes by 635 b.c. 

J See IV. iv. 21 and 476, and V. v. 463. 

J In Sennacherib’s day the name ’Cilicia’ had not yet been extended to the plain of 
Adana (Qu’c) and the rock-bound coast to the east of it, but was still confined to the 
inland province Khilakku, north of the Taurus, round the city eventually named 
Caesarea Mazaca (i.e. the district of the post-AIexandrine Kingdom of Inland Cappa¬ 
docia that was still officially known as Cilicia after the name had shifted, in the popular 
usage, to the country south of the mountains). This shift in the popular application of the 
name was the consequence of a change in political geography which followed Assyria’s 
collapse. After having been an Assyrian protectorate and even an Assyrian province 
(Forrcr, £.: Die Provinzeinleilung des Atiyrischen Reichei (Leipzig 1920, Hinrichs), pp. 
74 and 82), the principality of Khilakku not only recovered its independence but pro¬ 
ceeded to expand to the coast of the Mediterranean by annexing Qu’e (Forrcr, loc. cit., 
and the present Study, VI. vii. 668), as, some seventeen hundred years later, the same 
desirable lowland country was annexed by a refugee Armenian principality which had 
established itself in the highlands adjoining the Cappadocian Cilicia on the east (see 
p. 369, above). * See IV. iv. 422. 



424 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

century B.c. the Hellenes duly achieved their manifest destiny; but in 
the sixth century this destiny, imminent though it then already appeared 
to be, was abruptly postponed for two hundred years by a sudden turn 
of the wheel of Fortune. 

The employment of Greek mercenaries by the Neo-Babylonian war¬ 
lord Nebuchadnezzar becomes comprehensible when we remind our¬ 
selves that the warlike spirit of the Chaldaean tribesmen—as well as the 
tincture of Assyrian militarism which even the sedentary rural and 
urban population of Babylonia had perhaps momentarily acquired from 
the harsh experience of a hundred-years-long struggle for life against an 
atrocious Assyrian aggressor 1 —was rapidly evaporating under the de¬ 
pressing influence of a new anxiety. The Babylonians’ agonizing Assyrian 
nightmare had promptly returned in the new guise of a threat of being 
encircled and eventually engulfed by the Median hordes who had been 
the Babylonians’ allies in a common struggle against Assyrian enemies 
of the Human Race. When, circa 550 b.c., this Median cloud, banked 
on Zagros, that was now overhanging South-West Asia, was swollen to 
still more menacing dimensions by a sudden transfer of the hegemony 
over the restless tribes of Iran from the Medes to the Persians, the 
stricken peoples that had been enjoying a spell of uneasy freedom and 
peace since the downfall of the Assyrian Power were confronted with a 
choice between two new candidates for oecumenical dominion. If they 
were to stem the threatening deluge of Persian conquest from the 
Iranian Plateau, they must open the sluices to an infiltration of Hellenic 
mercenary man-power from the Mediterranean. 

Either of the two candidates for taking the Assyrians’ vacant place 
had something less uninviting than an Assyrian tyranny to offer. The 
Persians promised to a convalescent world the rest-cure of an oecumeni¬ 
cal peace whose easy-going semi-barbarian conservators would be more 
inclined to adopt their subjects’ institutions and ideas 2 than to impose 
their own. 3 The Hellenes promised to the patient the shock-treatment 
of rejuvenation through the impact of an adolescent society whose zest 
for adventure had not yet been quenched by any taste of the South- 
West Asian peoples’ crushing experience of passing under an Assyrian 
harrow'. At this turning-point in the history of a pre-Alexandrine Hellenic 
Society’s relations with its neighbours, the ghost of an Asshur who in 
his lifetime had inadvertently played the Hellenes’ game by paralysing 
their Levantine competitors for the thalassocracy of the Mediterranean, 
tipped the balance of choice against the Hellenic candidate for Asshur’s 
political heritage by moving the victimized peoples, whose memories the 
Assyrian spectre haunted, to opt for a political sedative in preference to 
a political stimulant. 4 


I See IV. iv. 476-80. 

in \' T v C rccep,ivity of ,hc Pcraian builders of the Achaemcnian Empire has been noticed 

3 See VI. vu. 580-689. The forbearance shown by the Achaemenidae in refraining 
trom making use of their political power for the propagation of a Zoroastrianism to which 
they themselves had become converts has been noticed in V. v. 704-5. 

« The majority of these peoples acquiesced in the sedative merely as a pit oiler, as was 
demonstrated in the event by the general insurrection of most of the subject peoples 
east of Euphrates in the year of anarchy following the assassination of the Emperor 



ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM 425 

In this political atmosphere the Hellenes’ sixth-century prospects in 
Egypt and South-West Asia were blotted out within the twenty years or 
so that elapsed between Cyrus’s conquest of the Lydian Empire circa 
547 b.c. and Cambyses’ conquest of Egypt circa 525 b.c. 1 Cyrus’s stroke, 
which substituted an outlandish Persian for a familiar Lydian suzerainty 
over the Hellenic city-states along the western seaboard of Anatolia, 
was the sharper as well as the more surprising of the two; but Cambyses’ 
conquest of Egypt dealt the Hellenes a further double blow; for, besides 
depreciating the military prestige of'brazen men’ who had failed to earn 
their keep by preserving Egypt’s independence, it placed Greek com¬ 
mercial interests in Egypt at the mercy of Persian goodwill. Moreover, 
these reverses that the rapid establishment of an Achaemenian Empire 
inflicted on the Hellenes were accentuated by the no less signal and 
sudden benefits which the same swift transformation of the political 
scene conferred upon the Syrophoenicians. 

To the peoples of Syria the establishment of the Achaemenian Empire 
brought not merely a rest-cure but a liberation and an opportunity; for 
Syria, unlike either Egypt or Babylonia, had obtained no respite from 
Assyria’s fall. She had become the prey of a Neo-Babylonian successor- 
state of the Assyrian Empire; and her new conquerors, into whose souls 
the iron of Assyrian militarism had entered, had taken a vicarious revenge 
for their sufferings at a now slain Asshur’s hands by treating their 
former fellow victims in Syria with an Assyrian harshness. Indeed, 
those few Syrian communities that had survived the Assyrian whips had 
been subjected by the Babylonians to a chastisement with scorpions. 
The fate of being carried into captivity, which Judah had escaped when 
Sennacherib had unsuccessfully laid siege to Jerusalem in 700 b.c., had 
overtaken her when Jerusalem had fallen to Nebuchadnezzar in the 
successive Babylonian sieges of 597 and 586 B.c.; and the Babylonian 
siege of 586-573 b.c. had proved a worse catastrophe for Tyre than the 
Assyrian siege of 674-668. The destruction of the Neo-Babylonian 
Empire by Cyrus gave the Babylonians’ Syrian subjects a relief that 
their neighbours had been enjoying since the destruction of Assyria; 
and in this long-delayed reversal of Syrian fortunes the Phoenician 
experience was even more dramatic than the Jewish. 

While the Jew's were allowed by the new Persian rulers of the Syriac 
World to return home from their Babylonian exile and to reconstruct 
Judah in the modest form of an autonomous temple-state, the four 
Syrophoenician cities were given, not merely autonomy for themselves, 
but a dominion, under Achaemenian suzerainty, over other Syrian com¬ 
munities 1 that placed them on at least a par, in both extent of territory 

Cambyses’ successor on the Achaemenian imperial throne, and by the repeated sub¬ 
sequent revolts of both the Babylonians and the Egyptians against Achaemenian rule. 
On the whole, however, the Persians managed first to establish and afterwards to 
maintain their empire without evoking anything like the resistance from the subject 
peoples that these Persian subjects’ ancestors had once offered to their Persian rulers’ 
Assyrian predecessors. The Persians profited by the Assyrians’ ferocity', which had 
broken the South-West Asian peoples’ spirit before the Persians came on the scene, as 
well as by the comparatively unprovocative mildness of their own Achaemenian regime. 

1 These are A. T. Olmstead’s dates in his History oj the Persian Empire (Chicago 1948, 
University of Chicago Press), pp. 37 and 88. 1 See V. v. 123, n. 2. 

B 2898 .vuj P 2 


426 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
and quantity of population, with the most powerful of the independent 
city-states of a contemporary Hellenic World: an Athens, an Akragas, 
a Syracuse, and perhaps even a Sparta. Moreover, the political benefits 
thus bestowed on the Syrophoenicians were matched by their economic 
gains from an Achacmcnian new order. The Syrophoenicians now found 
themselves partners in a commonwealth which stretched away inland 
from the Syrian coast of the Mediterranean into the interior of South- 
West Asia not merely up to the eastern slopes of the Zagros, like the 
Assyrian Empire, or up to the Zagros' western foot-hills, like the closer- 
cropped Neo-Babylonian Empire, but as far as the almost fabulously 
distant north-eastern outposts of Homo Agricola in KhwSrizm 1 and 
FarghSnah, 1 on the dry shore of the Great Eurasian Steppe. Under 
a stable and pacific Achaemcnian regime this vast area had become the 
Syrophoenicians’ continental economic hinterland; and, with the united 
forces of the Achaemcnian Empire behind them, they could hope to win 
a comparable opening for their maritime trade by recovering the lion’s 
share in the commerce of the Mediterranean which the Hellenes had 
captured from them while the Assyrians and Babylonians had been 
attacking them from the landward side. In Phoenician, as in Jewish, eyes 
the Achaemenian Empire was a heaven-sent instrument for the reinstate¬ 
ment of a chosen people in its rightful place in the sun; and it might be 
anticipated that, if archaeological enterprise were one day to bring to 
light a Tyrian counterpart of Deutcro-Isaiah’s tract, the Tyrian worship¬ 
per of Melkart would prove, like the Jewish worshipper of Yahweh, to 
have hailed Cyrus as the Lord’s Anointed. 

The Jews never had occasion to use the Achaemenian Empire as the 
instrument of an anti-Hellenic national policy, for the temple-state of 
Jerusalem, in its secluded inland fastness, did not come into collision 
with Hellenism till about 160 years after the overthrow of the Achacmen- 
ian Empire by Alexander the Great; but the Achaemcnian Empire did 
perform this service for the Syrophoenicians. In political partnership 
with the Persians they were able at last once again to face on equal, and 
more than equal, terms the Hellenic competitors who had been pushing 
them from pillar to post for the past 150 years. For the Phoenicians in 
their struggle with the Hellenes, union was the key to strength; and this 
strength through union, which had come to the Syrophoenicians as a 
Persian windfall, had already been acquired by their Libyphocnician 
colonists through Punic self-help. 

Instead of waiting, like their cousins on the Syrian seaboard, for a 
semi-barbarian empire-builder to save them, the colonial Phoenician 
communities in the Western Mediterranean had saved themselves by 
accepting the leadership of one of their own number, Carthage, and by 
entering into an alliance with the Etruscans, whose field of enterprise did 
not overlap with theirs and who were likewise under pressure from the 
Hellenes’ continuing westward expansion. This expansion had not 
ended with the Rhodians’ foundation of Akragas in 580 B.c. The 
Phocaeans had followed up their foundation of Massilia by planting 

1 The land of the Chorasmians (Hvirazmiy). 

1 The land of the Paricaniana (Pairikii). 



ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM 427 

a chain of posts along the east coast of the Iberian Peninsula and, circa 
566 b.c., 1 a colony at Alalia on the east coast of Corsica which served a 
twofold purpose by providing both a port of call en route for Massilia 
and a naval base for blockading Etruria. The foundation of Akragas had, 
however, been immediately followed by the first signal Hellenic reverse 
at Phoenician hands. An attempt, led by the Cnidian adventurer 
Pentathlus, to push the Phoenicians out of their all-important foothold 
at the western tip of Sicily by planting an Hellenic settlement at the 
strategic point Lilybaeum, commanding the harbour of Motye, was 
defeated—apparently without Carthaginian aid 2 —by the combined 
efforts of the Sicilian Phoenicians and the local natives; 3 and, when the 
surviving Cnidian adventurers succeeded in establishing themselves on 
the uninviting Lipari islands in lieu of the Sicilian vantage-point which 
they had failed to win, they found themselves harried here by the 
Etruscans. 

Lilybaeum's destiny was to become, not an Hellenic city-state, but 
a Carthaginian fortress; for the Carthaginian empire-builders’ first step 
was to establish their hegemony over their fellow Phoenician settlers on 
the coasts of Sicily, North-West Africa, and the Iberian Peninsula before 
going into partnership with the Etruscans. The Hellenes’ two maritime 
rivals were soon confronted with a formidable new Hellenic threat by 
a backwash from the empire-building activities of Cyrus. After conquer¬ 
ing Lydia, Cyrus summoned the Continental Asiatic Greek communities 
that had been under Lydian suzerainty to transfer their allegiance to 
him, and the Phocacans—though they had previously refused the offer 

of a new home in Tarshish 4 —responded to the Persian challenge by 
migrating en masse to their existing Corsican settlement at Alalia. 5 Here 
they made themselves so intolerable to Etruscans and Carthaginians 
alike as to provoke within five years a Tyrrheno-Carthaginian joint 
attack in which the Phocaeans won a battle 6 but lost the war owing to the 
crippling casualties suffered by their navy. The surviving victors had to 
evacuate Corsica and make a new home for themselves at Vclia, far down 
the west coast of Italy. 7 Meanwhile the majority of the Ionians, who, un¬ 
like the stalwart minority of the Phocaeans, had stayed at home and had 
been constrained to submit to a Persian suzerainty, had been discussing 

1 i.c. twenty years before the Phocaeans migrated to Alalia en matte (Herodotus, 
Book I, chap. 10$). 

2 See Dunbabin, T. J.: The Western Greeks (Oxford 1948, Clarendon Press), p. 332. 

2 There is no reason to suppose that these 'Elymi’ were not of the same origin and 

nationality as their diversely named native neighbours the ‘Sicana’ and ’SiceL’. Each 
swarm of Greek settlers in Sicily found a local name for the native population on whose 
territory it was trespassing. The name ‘Elymi’ may have been coined for the natives of 
North-Eastern Sicily by some Cnidian or Rhodian Greek settler at Selinfls or Akragas 
whose nearest non-G reek-speaking neighbours at home had been the Lycian ‘Solymi’. 

4 See Herodotus, Book f, chap. 163. _ 

1 The resolute migrants were a minority. A majority succumbed to homesickness and 
turned back to regain their Asiatic home at the price of submitting to a Persian yoke 
(Herodotus, Book I, chap. 165). 

* The date of this decisive naval battle at Alalia is usually taken to have been circa 
535 B.C.; but, if Cyrus conquered Lydia in 547 b.c. (see Olmstcad, A. T.: History oj the 
Persian Empire (Chicago 1948, University of Chicago Press), p. 40). and if his summons 
to the Continental Asiatic Greeks and the consequent migration of the Phocaeans to 
Corsica followed immediately after, this would indicate circa 541-540 B.c. as the date of 
the Battle of Alalia. ’ See Herodotus, Book I, chaps. « 64 ~ 7 - 


428 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
a project submitted by Bias of Priene for escaping from their new sub¬ 
jection by migrating en masse to Sardinia, 1 and this suggestion was 
revived some fifty years later, during the last agonies of the Ionian 
Revolt of 499-493 B.C., by the irresponsible-minded Milesian insurgent 
leader Aristagoras; 1 * but, even at the date when Bias first mooted the 
idea, the Hellenes had probably already been forestalled in Sardinia by 
the Carthaginians. 

We know that the Carthaginian empire-builders concentrated their 
efforts on the conquest of Sardinia as soon as they had made sure of their 
hold upon the original Phoenician establishments in Western Sicily; and, 
though the dates of the successive stages in the execution of their grand 
design are obscure, 1 the terms of the Carthagino-Roman treaty of 
circa 508 B.C. 4 suggest that the structure of the Carthaginian Empire was 
by then already complete. By the terms of the Carthagino-Etruscan 
alliance that had borne fruit in the allies’ lucrative defeat at Alalia, 
Sardinia had probably been included in a Carthaginian, and Corsica in 
an Etruscan, sphere of influence; 5 and, after securing a sufficiently firm 
grip on the coasts of Sardinia to be able to rule out any possibility of a 
Greek settlement there, the Carthaginian empire-builders turned west¬ 
ward. They occupied the Balearic Islands; crushed the Kingdom of 
Tarshish; 6 wiped out the Phoenician Gades’ Hellenic rival Mainake, 
the south-westernmost Phocaean outpost on the south-east coast of the 
Iberian Peninsula in the neighbourhood of Malaga; 7 and drew a wooden 
curtain across the southern half of the Western Mediterranean from 
Cape Nao to Cape Bon through the Balearic Islands, Sardinia, and the 
West Sicilian bridgehead of the Carthaginian dominions. In this Tunic 
Main’ and its Iberian and North-West African hinterlands, Hellenic 
shipping was thenceforth forbidden to ply and Hellenic wares could not 
be marketed except through Punic middlemen; 8 and this barred zone 
remained effectively closed to Hellenic commerce for a quarter of a 
millennium, 9 till the Punic monopoly was eventually broken by force of 


1 See Herodotus, Book I, chap. 170. * See Herodotus, Book V, chap. 124. 

J Dunbabin, op. cit., pp. 332-3, tentatively dates the establishment of Carthaginian 

rule in Western Sicily before the fall of Tyre in 573 B.C.; but Orosius, Adversum 
Paganos, Book IV, chap, vi, §§ 6-9, who is the only surviving Hellenic author to give 
any indication of a date, assigns not only the operations in Sicily but also the first opera¬ 
tions in Sardinia 'temporibus Cyri Persarum regis’. 

4 See Polybius, Book III, chap. 2. s See Dunbabin, op. cit., p. 344. 

6 Sec Carpenter, Rhys: The Creeks in Spain (Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania 192s, Bryn 

Mawr College), pp. 31-32; Dunbabin, op. cit., p. 344. 

7 Sec Carpenter, op. cit., pp. 20-30. 

8 See Karstcdt, U.: Geschiehle der Karthagtr von szS-146 (Berlin 1913, Weidmann), 
PP- 71 - 73 - , . 

r 9 f xc,US!0n the Hellenes by Carthaginian force of arms from a once lucrative 
field of Phocaean enterprise in the South-Western Mediterranean and the Atlantic was 
accepted by the Hellenic World as an accomplished fact with a resignation that cx- 
pressed itself in a symbolic usage of the phrase ‘Pillars of Hercules’ to signify the limit 
of what was attainable by human endeavour. By Pindar's day this piece of symbolism 
had already become proverbial, though Pindar (vivebat circa 52J-450 D.c.) had been 
bom before the erection of the Carthaginian ‘wooden curtain’ had been completed. 
I he third of Pindar’s Olympian Odes—written to celebrate a victory gained at the 
Olympian Games in 476 B.c. by Th*r6n, the despot of Akragas, who had shared with 
Hiero of Syracuse the distinction of defeating the Carthaginian attempt to conquer 
Sicily in 480 B.C. ends with the celebrated words: ‘And now Thfrfln in his achieve¬ 
ments has arrived at the limit. He has completed the long voyage from his home port 



ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM 429 
Roman arms in a struggle that took two generations (gerebatur 263-201 
b.c.) to reach its final decision. 

A simultaneous Etruscan endeavour to harvest the fruits of the Battle 
of Alalia by making an Etruscan mare clausum out of the Tyrrhene Sea 
was not carried to a similarly successful conclusion. An Etruscan attempt 
to conquer the Hellenes’ Campanian outpost, Cumae, was defeated in 
524 b . c . ; and, though the Etruscans nevertheless managed to retain a 
footing in Campania thereafter, their prospects of asserting their 
hegemony south of the Tiber were blighted by Rome’s successful revolt 
against an Etruscan domination circa 508 b . c . Yet, even so, the total set¬ 
back suffered by the Hellenes in the Western Mediterranean in the 
course of the generation following the Battle of Alalia was severe, and 
the disastrous failure of a last attempt to turn the tide again compelled 
them to recognize the hard fact that Carthaginian statesmanship had 
brought their westward advance to a halt against an insurmountable 
military barrier. When the Spartan King Clcomenes I’s brother Dorieus 
tried, circa 514-512 b . c ., 1 to emulate in Africa the achievement of the 
founders of Selinus and Akragas in Sicily by extending the belt of con¬ 
tinuous Hellenic settlement from Cyrenaica into Tripolitania on the 
threshold of the cluster of Libyphoenician communities in Tunisia, the 
Carthaginians turned this Hellenic interloper out; and, when, circa 
511-508 b . c ., Dorieus tried, as an alternative, to emulate the Cnidian 
Pentathlus’s supremely provocative attempt to wrest the western tip of 
Sicily out of the hands of the Carthaginians and their local Phoenician 
and Elymian subjects by establishing a Greek settlement at Eryx, the 
Spartan adventurer met his Cnidian predecessor’s fate.* 

Thus, before the turn of the sixth and fifth centuries b . c ., the expan¬ 
sion of the Hellenic World had been arrested in all directions by political 
combinations on the grand scale between the threatened members of 
competing societies; and it might now have been expected that the 
hitherto mobile eastern and western frontiers between an Hellenic and 
a Syriac World would settle down along the lines that Achaemenian and 
Carthaginian empire-builders had so firmly drawn. There seemed no 
reason why the former victims of Hellenic aggression should not remain 
content with their decisive success in bringing this aggression to a halt, 
or why the Hellenes, on their side, should not succeed in adapting them¬ 
selves to this adverse change in their political fortunes by carrying 
through an economic revolution towards which a sixth-century Athens 

to the Pillars of Hercules. What lies beyond is out of reach for sage and fool alike, and 
I am not the man to commit the folly of seeking to attain the unattainable.’ 

This despondent Hellenic Neplui ultra was, of course, much to the taste of the Cartha¬ 
ginians. whom it left in unchallenged possession of their exclusive commercial empire. 
After the Carthaginian monopoly of 'the barred zone’ had been finally broken by tho 
Romans through their victory in the Hannibalic War, seventeen more centuries were to 
pass before a Western Christendom, at the dawn of the Modem Age of its history’, was 
to cap the Phocaean explorer Colaeus’s feat of discovering Tarshish by making the tran- 
$!t of the Atlantic from Tarshish to the Antilles. This discovery of a New World, by 
which Modem Western Man was so lavishly rewarded for his audacity in defying a 
Pindaric veto, was characteristically commemorated by the minting of Spanish coins 
displaying the two Pillars of Hercules crossed by a scroll on which the exultant counter¬ 
motto Plus Ultra was defiantly inscribed; and this image and superscription ultimately 
gave birth to the United States dollar sign $ (sec XII. ix. 643, with n. 3). 

* Sec Dunbabin, op. cit., p. 349. a See ibid., p. 354. 


/ 


430 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

had already shown the way by deliberately changing over from an 
‘extensive’ economy of mixed farming for subsistence to an ‘intensive’ 
economy of specialized production for exchange against imports of raw 
materials and foodstuffs. A solution for the general Hellenic problem of 
pressure of population that had been worked out locally in one Hellenic 
city-state, which had happened to let slip her opportunity of joining in 
the seventh-century race for virgin lands to colonize overseas, offered an 
opportune means of economic salvation for a Hellas whose geographical 
expansion had been arrested in the course of the sixth century b.c. by the 
success of her rivals’ political counter-measures. 1 

The Achaemenian Empire's Counter-Offensive 

Evidently there were elements in the situation at the close of the sixth 
century B.c. on both sides that told in favour of a stabilization of the 
equilibrium between Hellenic and Syriac forces in which a sixth-century 
struggle between the two societies had resulted; yet, in the event, this 
equilibrium was upset almost as soon as the fifth century b.c. had 
entered on its course. How was the historian to account for this surpris¬ 
ingly unhappy denouement? An Hellenic student of human affairs 
would have found the cause of the calamity in some act of hybris, and a 
Modern Western inquirer might accept this Hellenic explanation in 
terms of Human Nature without leaving out of account the contributor}' 
effect of a fatality in the geographical setting of this tragedy. 

The human cause of the renewal of the conflict between the Hellenes 
and their neighbours in the fifth century b.c. was an error in Achaemen¬ 
ian statesmanship; and this error was a miscalculation into which empire- 
builders arc prone to fall when they have made sensationally wide and 
rapid conquests over populations that have proved easy game because 
their spirit has already been broken by previous harrowing experiences. 
In such circumstances the successful empire-builders are apt to attribute 
their success entirely to their own prowess, without recognizing their 
debt to forerunners whose ruthless ploughshares have broken the soil 
before the eventual empire-builders’ arrival on the scene to reap their 
easy harvest; and an overweening self-confidence bred by this mistaken 
belief in their own invincibility then leads the successful empire-builders 
on to court disaster by rashly attacking still unbroken peoples whose 
spirit and capacity for resistance take them by surprise. This is the 
story of the disaster suffered in Afghanistan in a . d . 1838 - 42 2 by British 
conquerors of the derelict domain of a broken-down Mughal Raj in 
India who had light-heartedly assumed that the unscathed highlanders 
of Eastern Iran would submit to them as tamely as the stricken popula¬ 
tion of a sub-continent whose demoralizing experience of five centuries 
of alien rule had been crowned by the agony of a century of anarchy. 5 
The same unpleasant surprise awaited Alexander the Great when, after 
his swift and easy conquest of the passive main body of the Achaemenian 
Empire west of the Caspian Gates, he set himself to subjugate the barons 

1 See I. i. 24-25J II. ii. 38-42; and III. iii. 122; IV. iv. 200-14; IX. xi. 387. 

3 This British disaster in Afghanistan has been touched upon on pp. 220 and 231, 
* bove - 1 Sec xi, maps 44, 45, 52, 52A, 53. 


ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM 43 x 
of Khurasan and Transoxania, whose spirit had been kept alive by their 
active service as wardens of the Syriac World’s north-eastern marches 
over against the Eurasian Steppe. 1 

The winning of the voluntary allegiance of these spirited Iranian 
marchmen was the one great political achievement of the Achaemenian 
empire-builders outside the limits of the broad field within which the 
ground had been prepared for them by the ruthlessncss of their Assyrian 
forerunners; and here too the Achaemenidae were assisted in their 
political task by local anxieties springing from painful recollections. The 
sedentary Iranian peoples to the north-east of the Caspian Gates had 
felt the full fury of a Cimmerian and Scythian Eurasian Nomad storm 
which had broken over South-West Asia at the turn of the eighth and 
seventh centuries b.c. in waves of invasion that had flowed on as far 
westward as Lydia and Palestine. The Iranian, like the Phoenician, 
marchmen of the Achaemenian Empire appreciated the support that they 
stood to gain from membership in this gigantic oecumenical polity 
for the waging of their perpetual warfare against their traditional 
enemies. 2 But, when Cyrus pushed on beyond ‘the Sown’ into ‘the 
Desert’ to attack the formidable Central Asian Nomads on their own 
ground, these Massagctae inflicted on him a disaster that cost him his 
fife; and his third successor Darius was lucky to escape with his life 
when, some seventeen years later, 1 he essayed the rather less hopeless 
task of bringing to heel a Scythian Nomad adversary whose freedom of 
manoeuvre was limited by the relatively narrow confines of the Scythians’ 
domain in the Steppe’s Great Western Bay. Cyrus’s first successor, 
Cambyscs, brought a similar catastrophe on himself when he tried to 
round off his facile conquest of an Asshur-haunted Egypt by invading 
an unscathed Ethiopia; but the supreme Achaemenian miscalculation 
was made by Darius and his successor Xerxes when they attempted to 
conquer an Hellenic World which Cyrus had been content to contain 
within what looked at first sight like ‘a natural frontier’. 4 

Probably Cyrus had imagined that he was bequeathing to his succes¬ 
sors a definitive north-west frontier when he had completed his conquest 
of the Lydian dominions by subjugating the Asiatic Greek communities 
that had previously acknowledged Lydia’s suzerainty. Yet Apollo’s 
warning to King Croesus of Lydia that, if he crossed the River Halys, 
he would destroy a Great Power 5 might have been addressed to Croesus’s 
conqueror Cyrus with no less prescience on a rather longer view; for, in 
conquering the Lydian Empire, Cyrus was unwittingly bequeathing to 
his successors an entanglement with the Hellenic World which was 
eventually to be the death of the Achaemenian Empire. 


• Sec II. ii. 140. 

1 Sec II. ii. 138. In a year of insurrection (522-521 n.c.)in which most of the peoples 
between the Caspian Gates and the Euphrates attempted to throw off a not very onerous 
Achaemenian yoke, the Bactrian marchmen did not succumb to the temptation. 

J Cyrus's campaign against the Massagetae is dated 530 b.c., and Darius’s campaign 
against the Scyths 513 B.C., by A. T. Olmstead: History of the Persian Empire (Chicago 
1948, University* of Chicago Press), pp. 87 and 147-8. 

♦ The psychological limit to Achaemenian annexations that was set by the physical 

limits of previous Assyrian and Eurasian Nomad ravages has been noticed in VI. vii. 
684-5. * Herodotus, Book I, chap. 53. 



432 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
The Achaemenids’ Assyrian predecessors, who had been so recklessly 
aggressive in other quarters, 1 had refrained from trying to carry their 
north-westward advance beyond the south-eastern fringe of the central 
desert of Anatolia; and this was not only a genuine natural frontier; it 
was also a cultural watershed dividing East Anatolian survivors of a 
broken-down Hittitc Civilization over whom the Assyrians had extended 
their rule 2 from West Anatolian backwoodsmen of an Hellenic World 1 
which was still in the full vigour of its youth. This Central Anatolian 
line of demarcation between two diverse worlds had, however, been 
overrun during the death agonies of Assyria by barbarian Volker- 
wandcrungcn in both directions. An eastward-travelling wave of 
Phrygian barbarians from a no-man’s-land between the Assyrian 
Empire and Lydia had surged up the Halys Valley into the upper basin 
of the Euphrates to break against the Dcrsim 4 Highlands and wash 
round their south-western foot-hills into the upper basin of the Tigris, 5 
while a westward-travelling wave of Cimmerian and Scythian Nomad 
invaders from the Eurasian Steppe had burst through the Caspian Gates 

* See IV. iv. 476-80. 

» While there seem* to be no doubt that the south-eastern edge of the Central Anato¬ 
lian Desert constituted the north-west frontier of the Assyrian Empire in the sector 
between the Taurus and the Halys, there is some uncertainty about the extent of the 
Assyrian dominions towards the north. According to E. Forrer: Die Provinzeinteilung 
det Attyrischen Reiches (Leipzig 1920, Hinrichs), pp. 74 “nd 77. 'he principality of Kam- 
manu—which appears to correspond to the Hellenic geographers' Southern Comana, 
and not to their Chamanfn? (see VI. vii. 669, n. 6)—had belonged, before its annexa¬ 
tion by Sorgon in 712 B.C., to the Kasku, whom %ve may identify with the Gasga bar¬ 
barian denizens of the wooded mountains between the Anatolian Plateau and the Black 
Sea coast who, in the second millennium B.C., had given such trouble to the Hittitcs even 
at the height of their power. A prince of Kasku is recorded (sec Forrer, op. cit., p. 74) 
to have paid tribute to Tiglath-Pileser III (regnabal 746-727 B.C.); and this indication 
that Assyrian suzerainty- in Eastern Anatolia may have extended northwards towards 
the mouth* of the Halys (Qyzyl Irmaq) and the Iris (Yeshil IrmSq) is supported by the 
fact that the Cappadocians were called ‘Syrians’ by the Greeks who settled at Sinope, 
Amisus, and other points along this coast in and after the eighth century B.c. (see, for 
example, Herodotus, Book I, chaps. 72 and 76; Book III, chap. 90; Book V, chap. 49; 
Book VII, chap. 72). The Greek name ‘Syria*, like the Persian name ‘Athurf’, originally 
meant simply ‘the Assyrian Empire*. The Greeks called the inhabitants of the eastern 
seaboard of the Mediterranean ‘Syrians’ because their country had once been under 
Assyrian rule, and, on this analogy, the application of the name ‘White Syrians’ to the 
inhabitants of the southern seaboard of the Black Sea would imply that Assyrian rule 
had once extended to this coast likewise (see VI. vii. 581). 

Whether Pontic Cappadocia as well as Inland Cappadocia was or was not included in 
the Assyrian Empire, it is certain that the Hittite Civilization of Inland Cappadocia had 
long since made itself at home in Pontic Cappadocia as well by the time when Augustus’s 
contemporary, the Hellenic geographer Strabo of Amasia, wrote his description of a 
country that was his homeland. This cultural reclamation of the once barbarian in¬ 
habitants of the Pontic Cappadocian country is likely to have taken place at a time when 
the two Cappadocias were united politically under one sovereignty; and, if they were not 
united in the eighth and seventh centuries b.c. as provinces or dependencies of the 
Assyrian Empire, we may conjecture that the radiation of the Hittitc Civilization into 
Pontus began under the Achacmcnian regime, after Inland Cappadocia had been de¬ 
tached from the autonomous principality of Cilicia (of which this Inland Cappadocia was 
the original nucleus) and had been united with Pontic Cappadocia to form a single 
Cappadocian viceroyalty (sec VI. vii. 674). 

> The focus of the Hellenic Civilization was the basin of the Aegean Sea, and the 
radiation of Hellenism grew progressively fainter at each successive farther remove from 
the Aegean coast of the continent into the interior on both the Asiatic and the European 
side. An eighth-century traveller from Phocaca or Smyrna up the valley of the Hcrmus 
would have found the light dwindling in Lydia and fading out in Phrygia, as a contem¬ 
porary traveller from Olynthus or Meth6nS up the valley of the Axius would have found 
it gradually diminishing as he passed through Macedonia and Paconia into Dardania. 

* Graeci Derxinfi or Xerx§n« (sec VI. vii. 666). » See VI. vii. 604-3. 


ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM 


433 


and broken into Anatolia from Azerbaijan by travelling up the Araxes 
and down the Halys. 1 

This double deluge of Barbarism had obliterated the old Anatolian 
landmarks, and the two Powers, Lydia and Media, which had then 
risen to greatness by sharing the honour of bringing the turbulent flood 
waters under control, had fallen into conflict with one another over the 
division between them of Anatolian territories that they had delivered 
from a barbarian domination. An inconclusive contest had ended in 
585 b.c. in a partition of the peninsula along the line of the Lower 
Halys; 2 and, after Croesus had been tempted by the news of Media’s 
fall to upset this Medo-Lydian settlement by crossing the Halys in order 
to lay hands on formerly Median territory in North-Eastern Anatolia, 
which Cyrus regarded as being his own lawful property by right of his 
claim to be his deposed grandfather King Cyaxares of Media’s legitimate 
successor, the Persian empire-builder sought to solve an Anatolian 
frontier problem which he had inherited from his Median predecessors 
by a wholesale annexation of the Lydian Empire and its dependencies 
that carried the north-west frontier of the Achaemcnian Empire forward 
from the cast bank of the River Halys to the eastern shores of the Black 
Sea Straits and the Aegean Sea. 

If, in making this sweeping westward advance, Cyrus imagined that 
he was replacing an artificial frontier by a natural one, he was acting 
under a misapprehension which was mercilessly exposed by the sequel; 
for the salt sea—which had once poured in to isolate an ‘Asia’ from a 
‘Europe’ when the God Poseidon’s dramatic trident-stroke had cleft an 
originally unbroken continent in twain from the mouths of the Aegean 
Sea to the head of the Sea of Azov—had, by Cyrus’s day, long since 
ceased to be ‘estranging’. 3 An element whose challenging inroad had 
stimulated primitive pioneers in the art of seamanship to become the 
creators of the Minoan Civilization 4 had lost its primeval terrors for 
post-Minoan Hellenic mariners who had ventured out of a land-locked 
Aegean into the Mediterranean and on out of the Mediterranean into 
the Atlantic. For the Hellenes of the sixth century b.c., the once estrang¬ 
ing Aegean had become a ‘tunny pond’ linking, instead of sundering, the 
‘Asiatic’ and ‘European’ halves of Hellas as, in the twentieth century 
of the Christian Era, the ‘European’ and ‘American’ halves of a Modern 
Western World were linked together by a ‘herring pond’ which had 
once been an impassable gulf. And even the island-studded Aegean, with 
its chain of submerged mountains lifting their peaks above sea-level to 
offer a timid wayfarer alternative rows of stepping stones, was not so 
easy for landsmen to cross as the river-like straits at the Bosphorus and at 
the Dardanelles. 

Cyrus’s third successor Darius had no sooner completed his re- 


« See VI. vii. 606-10 and 675-6' 

J The river line which thus served as a political frontier from 585 «o 547 BC : wa) 
play the tame role again some eighteen or nineteen centuries later when, (tom circa A.D. 
x 243 to circa a.d. 1335, it formed the frontier between the Mongol Il-Khans of Iran and 
'Iraq and their vassals the Saljuq Sultans of Rum and these Saljflqs' local successors. 

J Sec the lines from Matthew Arnold’s poem Iiolation, quoted in II. i. 3 * 6 . 

♦ Sec the lines from Horace’s Odes, Book I, Ode 3, quoted in II. i. 327. 



434 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
organization of the Achaemenian Empire after the Year of Insurrection 
than he took the short step from the Continental Asiatic Greek headland 
of Mycalc on to the adjacent island of Samos; 1 and, after that, he threw 
a bridge of boats across the Bosphorus, as easily as across the Danube, 
in laying his line of communications for his campaign against the Scyths 
in 513 b.c. The ill-success of this excursion into the Great Western Bay 
of the Eurasian Steppe did not deter Darius from enlarging his foothold 
on the European side of the Straits next year, when he extended his 
suzerainty westward as far as Mount Olympus. In the same year 512 
B.c. his viceroy in Egypt encroached on the Hellenic World from another 
quarter by annexing Cyrenaica. In 510-505 b.c. 2 Achaemenian diplomacy 
made an attempt to cast its imperial net over Athens, and in 500 B.c. the 
emperor’s viceroy in Lydia made an abortive expedition against the 
Aegean island of Naxos. It might almost have seemed as if Darius were 
annexing the Hellenic World in a fit of absentmindedness if there had 
not been a hint of something more like a grand design in his dispatch of a 
reconnoitring expedition as far afield as Magna Graecia 3 even before his 
occupation of Samos, and in the interest that he showed (if Herodotus 
is to be believed) 4 in a scheme for the occupation of Sardinia that was 
dangled before him by the Milesian adventurer Histiaeus. However 
that may be, Darius made no secret of his resolve to extinguish what 
remained of Hellenic independence after the year 499 b.c., when the 
dispatch of a naval expeditionary force by a still independent Athens and 
a still independent Eretria had given the signal for an insurrection of the 
Achaemenian Empire’s Hellenic subjects which spread from the west 
coast of Anatolia to the Bosphorus in one direction and to Cyprus in 
the other.* 

Though the immediate occasion of this formidable outbreak had been 
a personal quarrel between the Persian and the Greek commander of the 
abortive naval expedition against Naxos in the preceding year, the under¬ 
lying cause was the irksomeness of even the easy-going Achaemenian 
regime to an Asiatic maritime people who, unlike the Ionians’ unsuccess¬ 
ful Syrophocnician competitors for the economic dominion of the 
Mediterranean, had never had their spirit broken on the chariot-wheel 
of Assyrian militarism. Sober reason should have reminded Darius that, 
though the Continental Asiatic Hellenes had not been crushed by the 
Assyrians, they had at any rate been partially broken in to political 
servitude by their previous experience of a Lydian suzerainty which had 
never been imposed on their European kinsmen, and that in his own 
day these rebellious Ionian subjects of his were the least warlike of all 
contemporary Hellenes. If a subject Ionia had nevertheless proved to 

» See Herodotus, Book III, chap. 139. 

1 See Olmstead, op. cit., pp. 151-2. 

» Sec the story of Darius’s Crotoniate Greek physician DcmocMfs in Herodotus, 
Book III, chaps. 129-38. 

* See Herodotus, Book V, chap. 106, and Book VI, chap. 2. 

5 The revolt was not confined to Asiatic Hellenes whose mother tongue happened to 
be Greek. The non-Greek-speaking Carian insurgents gave the Persians more trouble 
than all their Greek-speaking comrades-in-arms (Herodotus, Book V, chaps. 117-21). 
On the other hand the Cypriots, whose mother tongue was Greek but who were not yet 
more than semi-Hellenic in their culture, were reconquered by the Persians with com¬ 
parative case (Herodotus, Book V, chaps. 108-16). 



ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM 4 35 

be a hornet’s nest, an Achaemenian empire-builder could not reasonably 
expect to make an easy conquest of other Hellenic peoples who had 
never yet lost their independence; but Reason was eclipsed by Anger in 
the soul of an emperor who had taken the provocation offered him in 
499 b . c . as an unpardonable defiance of his pretensions to world- 
dominion; the eclipse of Reason left the blinded autocrat at the mercy of 
Hybris; and Hybris betrayed him into the fatal decision to resort to his 
predecessor Cyrus’s dubious policy of cutting his way out of an exasperat¬ 
ing geographical entanglement. 

Cyrus had got rid of an unsatisfactory river-frontier with Lydia by 
extending his dominion over the domain of the Lydian Empire; Darius 
would get rid of an unsatisfactory sea-frontier with an independent 
remnant of Hellas by bringing the whole of Hellas, in her turn, under 
his oecumenical sovereignty. After the last embers of Hellenic revolt in 
Asia had been stamped out in 493 b.c., Darius immediately started 
operations against Hcllas-in-Europe. The year 492 B.c. saw Mardonius’s 
abortive expedition against Continental European Greece along the 
north shore of the Aegean; the year 490 B.c. saw Datis’ and Artaphernes’ 
likewise abortive expedition across the Aegean to Marathon. Thereafter 
Darius’s energies were diverted, for the rest of his life, to the task of 
suppressing a revolt in Egypt; but the reverses of 492 and 490 B.c. did 
not move him to reconsider his designs against Hellas; he bequeathed 
them, unabated, to his successor Xerxes; and Xerxes’ dutiful execution 
of his father’s political testament led him into the historic disasters of 
480-479 b.c. at Salamis, Plataea, and MycalS. 

The Aftermath on the Political Plane 

In retorting to the revolt of his Hellenic subjects in Asia by resolving 
to conquer their kinsmen and accomplices in Europe, Darius had con¬ 
verted a seven-years-long insurrection (flagrabat 499-493 b.c.) into a 
fifty-onc-years-long war [gerebatur 499-449 b.c.) ; for the trial of strength 
with a still independent Hellas to which Darius had committed the 
Achaemenian Empire did not end with the failure in 479 b.c. of Xerxes’ 
invasion of Europe. Before peace could be restored the Achaemenidae 
had to reconcile themselves to the loss of the western seaboard of 
Anatolia from Lycia to the Bosphorus inclusive, in addition to the loss of 
their Transhellespontinc outposts in Europe, while the Athenians had 
to recognize their inability permanently to detach Pamphylia, Cyprus, 
and Egypt as well from the Achaemenian Empire. These disillusioning 
experiences on both sides did at last beget a peace settlement which was 
as statesmanlike in its objective of re-establishing peace on terms that 
would not prove intolerable for either party as it was ingenious in 
translating this enlightened aim into practical provisions for bilateral 
demilitarization; 1 and for a few years after the negotiation of the 

« A masterly elucidation of the terms of the Athcno-Achaemenian peace settlement of 
450/449 B.C. by H. T. Wade-Gen’ will be found in Harvard Studies in Classical Philo¬ 
logy, special volume: 'Athenian Studies Presented to William Scott Ferguson’ (Cam¬ 
bridge, Mass. 1940, Harvard University Press), pp. 121-56. A cynic might point out 
that the high contracting parties came to terms with one another at the expense of the 
Asiatic Hellenes whose aspirations to political independence had been the original cause 



436 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

Atheno-Achaemenian treaty of 450/449 B.c. it looked as if this act of 
statesmanship might have succeeded in restoring a general equilibrium 
between the Syriac and Hellenic worlds that had been momentarily 
attained towards the close of the sixth century b.c., after the Carthagin¬ 
ians had finished rounding off their empire and before Darius had 
begun to extend the bounds of his. 

The destruction of this sixth-century equilibrium in the Aegean and 
the Levant through the outbreak of the Hcllcno-Persian War of 499-449 
b.c. had been followed by corresponding upheavals in the Western 
Mediterranean. A Carthaginian attack on the Hellenes in Sicily which 
had been delivered in the year of Xerxes’ attack on Continental European 
Greece 1 had ended there in an even greater catastrophe for the aggressor; 
and Hiero’s victory over the Carthaginians had set his hands free to 
inflict an equally signal defeat on the Etruscans when, six years later, 
these allies of Carthage belatedly delivered a fresh attack on the Cam¬ 
panian outpost of the Hellenic World at Cumae. 2 Thus in the Western 
Mediterranean peace had been restored a quarter of a century before its 
restoration in the Levant in 449 B.c. But an equilibrium that had even¬ 
tually been re-established in all quarters was upset once again before the 
fifth century had run its course, and this time the disturbing factor was 
not any fresh Persian or Carthaginian act of aggression against Hellas, 
but the outbreak in 431 b.c. of a fratricidal war between Hellene and 
Hellene which spelled the breakdown of the Hellenic Civilization. 1 

This warfare within the bosom of the Hellenic Society, which dragged 
on from 431 B.c. until a settlement was dictated in 338 b.c. to the city- 
states of Continental European Hellas by King Philip of Macedon, upset 
the equilibrium between the Hellenic World and its neighbours in 
divers ways. 

In the first place it presented both the Carthaginians and the Achae- 
menidae with an irresistible temptation to take advantage of their 
Hellenic rivals’ apparently suicidal mania. After the crippling of the 
power of Athens through the disaster that overtook the Athenian expedi¬ 
tionary force in Sicily in 413 B.C., the Carthaginians broke a seventy- 
ycars-long truce with their independent Hellenic neighbours by trying 
their hand in 409-406 B.c. at a conquest of the whole of Sicily, including 
Syracuse, which the Athenians had just failed to achieve, while the 
Achaemenidae began to take cautious steps for the recovery of the 
Asiatic Greek territories which they had lost in 479 B.c. and had been 
compelled to renounce thirty years later. In this new counter-offensive 
the Carthaginians were less successful than the Persians. In Sicily after 
the Carthaginian breach of the peace in 409 B.c. the struggle swayed to 

of the war. So far from leaving the Asiatic Hellenes independent, the treaty of 450/449 b.c. 
appears to have left them defenceless against their former masters the Achaemenidae as 
well as against their present masters the Athenians by providing for the dismantling of 
their fortifications. 

1 The scanty surviving evidence leaves it an open question whether these two simul¬ 
taneous attacks on the Hellenic World in 480 B.c. were concerted, or whether their 
simultaneity was fortuitous. 

1 For the previous attack in 524 B.C., see p. 429, above. 

5 There was a relation of historical effect and cause between the breakdown of the 
Hellenic Civilization in 431 b.c. and the successful repulse of Xerxes’ attack on Hellas 
in 480-479 B.c. (sec pp. 522-5, below). 


ENCOUNTERS WITH HELLENISM 437 

and fro for 168 years, during which the Carthaginians always just failed 
to take Syracuse and the Hellenes to take Lilybaeum, till the Carthagin¬ 
ian wooden curtain across the south-western quarter of the Mediter¬ 
ranean was battered in by Roman rams in the first Romano-Punic War 
(gerebatur 263-241 b . c .). In the Aegean and the Levant, on the other 
hand, the Achacmenian Imperial Government had the satisfaction in 
386 b . c . of dictating to the warring states of Continental European 
Greece ‘the Emperor’s Peace’ in a communique announcing that His 
Imperial Majesty Artaxerxcs II was vindicating the historic rights of his 
house by resuming possession of all Hellenic territories on the Asiatic 
mainland, together with the islands of Clazomenae and Cyprus. 

At that moment the Achacmenian Empire might have been thought 
to have achieved by diplomacy all that Darius the Great had dreamed of 
achieving by force, for the communique went on to decree that all other 
Hellenic communities except the ancient Athenian possessions of 
Lemnos, Imbros, and Scyros were to have their independence restored 
to them by the fiat of the Imperial Court at Susa. Appearances, however, 
were deceptive; for another effect of the long-drawn-out fratricidal war¬ 
fare in Hellas was to make the Hellenes past masters in the art of war at 
the cost of ruining everything that had once made Hellenic life worth 
living; and the Achacmenian and Carthaginian empires were swept 
away as soon as the new Hellenic weapons forged at this prohibitive 
price were turned by Macedonian and Roman war-lords against the 
Hellenic World’s hereditary enemies. 1 

The Aftermath on the Cultural Plane 

Thus the military and political aggression of the Hellenic Society 
against its neighbours, which the victims of it had succeeded in arresting 
in the sixth century b.c., was resumed in and after the fourth century 
b . c . in a wider arena which has already been surveyed in an earlier 
chapter; 2 but there was also a cultural plane of action on which enduring 
pacific conquests were made by the Hellenic Civilization before, as well 
as after, the generation of Alexander the Great. 

The natives of Sicily, who did their utmost to resist by force of arms 
the interloping Greek colonists’ aggressive attempts to evict or subjugate 
them, were at the same time voluntarily adopting the language, religion, 
and art of their Greek assailants. 3 The never conquered Elymi, as well 
as the Sican subjects of Akragas and Sicel subjects of Syracuse, took to 
speaking Greek, calling their hereditary divinities by Hellenic names, 
and honouring them by building them temples in the Hellenic style 
of architecture. A notable Sicel convert to the Hellenic culture was 
Ducetius, the defeated patriot leader in the Sicels’ last stand against 
Syracusan imperialism. 4 Even in the 'barred zone’ behind a Carthaginian 
‘wooden curtain’, where no Hellenic ships might sail nor Hellenic 
merchants set foot on land to do business direct with the Carthaginians’ 
African and Iberian native subjects, the militant Carthaginian middle- 

* See III. iii. 150, and p.409, above. 1 On pp. 403-18, above. 

» See, for example, Dunbabin, op. tit., pp. 177, 191-3. ar * d 334 ~S- 

* See V. vi. 235-6, and p. 587, below. 


438 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
man, who exploited a monopoly won through force of arms by pocketing 
as large a share of the commercial profits as the trade would bear, found 
himself constrained to eke out his own Punic poverty of creative power 
and artistic sensibility by importing the attractive manufactures of the 
independent Hellenic communities in Sicily to supply the economic 
demand of the Carthaginian Empire and its vast commercial hinterland; 
and, however successful the Libyphoenician might be as a business man 
in fleecing both the natives and the Hellenes between whom he had 
forcibly interposed himself, it was beyond his power—and no doubt 
equally beyond the range of his imagination—to think of preventing the 
native peoples under his control from being influenced by the artistry 
of Hellenic wares which the Punic importer was compelled to peddle 
because his own industries were incapable of emulating them. 

An Hellenic culture, whose radiation thus triumphantly succeeded in 
penetrating 'the wooden curtain’ that screened the Carthaginian Empire, 
made relatively easy conquests in a contemporary Achacmenian Empire 
where the regime was much less restrictive and the population much 
more cultivated. The Hcllenization of Lydia, which had been given an 
impetus by the incorporation of the Continental Asiatic Hellenes into 
the Lydian Empire in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C., had gone so 
far by 401 b.c.— sixty-seven years before Alexander’s crossing of the 
Dardanelles—that in that year a Lydian, who, by assuming a Boeotian 
accent, had successfully passed himself off as a Hellene in order to enlist 
in an expeditionary force of Hellenic soldiers of fortune, was able to 
sustain his part so well that he might have remained undetected by his 
comrades-in-arms if his pierced ears had not eventually betrayed him to 
Hellenic eyes sharpened by danger;’ and between the turn of the century 
and 334 B - c - l hc Syrophoenicians capitulated on the cultural plane to the 
Hellenic style of art, though the persistence on the economic and political 
planes of their hostility to their hereditary enemy was to be demon¬ 
strated in 332 B.c. by the desperate military resistance which Alexander 
was to encounter at Tyre. But a pre-Alexandrine Hellenism’s most fruit¬ 
ful cultural conquests were not made in either of the two great Syriac 
empires whose establishment in the sixth century- b.c. had arrested 
the Hellenic World’s military, political, and commercial expansion. The 
historic event in the propagation of Hellenism in this age was the 
Hellcnization of the Etruscans and other originally non-Hellenic peoples 
on the western seaboard of Italy. 

The Etruscans had no sooner settled in Italy than they began to be 
appreciably affected by the culture of an Hellenic World which lay 
between this transmarine Etruria and an Anatolian homeland with which 
the colonial Etruscans must soon have lost touch—to judge by the 
absence of any convincing indication of their place of origin in those 
echoes of a colonial Etruscan tradition which the historian’s ear could 
catch in the surviving works of Hellenic antiquarians. After the mili¬ 
tary struggle between Etruscans and Hellenes for the command of 

1 .See Xenophon, Expedilio Cyri, Book III, chap, i, §| 26-32. Already in 480 b.c. the 
equipment of the Lydian contingent in Xerxes’ expeditionary force had been almost 
identical with the Hellenic equipment of the day (Herodotus, Book VII, chap. 74). 



ENCOUNTERS WITH THE SYRIAC WORLD 439 

the Tyrrhene Sea had ended on a basis of uti possidetis as a result of 
the Etruscans’ naval defeat off Cumae in 474 b.c., the reception of the 
Hellenic culture in Etruria was so catholic and so rapid that the Etruscans 
had become Hellenes by adoption before they fell under the rule of 
Roman empire-builders who acquired much of their own Hellenism at 
second hand from their Etruscan neighbours and eventual subjects. 1 

The Hcllcnization of Rome—in the first instance perhaps mainly 
through Etruscan intermediaries and latterly also through a direct inter¬ 
course, of ever increasing intimacy, between Romans and Greeks—was, 
of course, the most important cultural conquest that the Hellenes ever 
achieved at any stage of their history either before or after the generation 
of Alexander; for the Romans, whatever their origin, 2 took up a task 
which had proved to be beyond the power of the Etruscan settlers on 
the West Italian coast to the north of them and the Greek settlers on the 
West Italian coast to the south of them and the Massilian pioneers of 
Hellenism at the mouth of the Rhone. After the Italiot Greeks had 
succumbed to an Oscan and the Etruscans to a Celtic barbarian counter¬ 
offensive, the Romans carried a Latinized Hellenism into the Abruzzi 
and over the Appennines and the Po and the Alps till they had planted 
it right across the Continental European hinterland of the Mediter¬ 
ranean, from the delta of the Danube to the mouths of the Rhine and, 
across the Straits of Dover, in Britain. 2 

3. Encounters with the Syriac Civilization 4 

In the sinister history of Assyrian militarism the principal episode, as 
we have already observed, was a domestic conflict between the Assyrian 
march and the Babylonian interior of a Babylonic World; for this fra¬ 
tricidal struggle ruined the Babylonic Society before ending in a Pyrrhic 
victory for a short-lived Neo-Babylonian Empire. 5 We have also ob¬ 
served, however, that this disastrous militarism had been generated by 
the grim ordeal of a life-and-dcath struggle which had been forced upon 
Assyria in the eleventh and tenth centuries b.c. by aggressive Aramaean 
pioneers of a nascent Syriac Civilization 6 whose north-eastward expan¬ 
sion was a belated backwash from a Volkerwanderung precipitated by 

1 The acceleration in the process of the Hellenization of Etruria between the sixth 
and the fourth century B.c. is graphically recorded in the wall-paintings in Etruscan 
tombs at Caere (Cervetri). On the other hand, in their depiction of the torments in¬ 
flicted on the damned in Hell, the Etruscan painters betray an un-Hellenic vein of sadism 
in the Etruscan £thos which was incidentally communicated to the Roman pupils in an 
Etruscan school of Hellenism, and which reappears even in a latter-day Tuscan Dante’s 
Ditina Commedia. The origin of this sinister streak in the Etruscan tradition is a mystery. 
It makes the impression of being of non-Hellenic provenance (though the torments of 
the damned do figure in Hellenic art and legend); and it is a matter of recorded history 
that the institution of gladiatorial shows, which was perhaps the most atrocious of all 
the cruel practices that the Romans learnt from Etruscan instructors, was so abhorrent 
to Greek feelings that it never gained any foothold in Greek communities under Roman 
rule. The inference is that this Etruscan sadism was an element in the Etruscans’ 
Anatolian heritage which was too near to the heart of their tradition for the counter¬ 
influence of Hellenism to be able to eliminate it. Yet, if the origin of Etruscan sadism 
may be Anatolian, it can hardly be Hittite; for, to judge by the surviving corpus of Hit- 
titc legislation, the Hittite Civilization was as humane as the Hellenic. 

1 See pp. 702-5, below. J Sec II. ii. 160-4 and V. v. 213-15. 

* See xi, maps 17. >8, 19, 20, 2t, 31. 

J See II. ii. 135-7 »nd IV. iv. 476-84. 6 See II. ii. 134-5. 



440 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
the collapse of ‘the New Empire’ of Egypt in South-West Asia and the 
overthrow of ‘the thalassocracy of Minos’ in the Aegean. Thus a collision 
with an alien society had been the occasion of an Assyrian transgression 
that was eventually fatal to the society of which the Assyrians themselves 
were members. The Syriac Civilization was not the only alien society 
that was to cross the path of the Assyrians before these rabid Babylonic 
militarists had bled themselves to death. The Assyrians also bore down 
upon the remnants of an already broken Hittite Society astride the 
Taurus, and upon an Egyptiac Society that had continued to survive 
in the Nile Valley in a petrified state after repelling ‘the Sea Peoples’ 
from the coasts of the Delta at the turn of the thirteenth and twelfth 
centuries b.c. But, in the history of these three encounters with a Baby- 
Ionic Civilization represented first by Assyria and, after Assyria’s self- 
annihilation, by Babylonia, the reactions of the Babylonic World’s 
Syriac neighbours were of outstanding historical importance; and the 
outcome of this interplay between the Syriac and the Babylonic Civiliza¬ 
tion is an impressive illustration of the truth that 'the meek shall inherit 
the Earth’. 1 

In a drama which opened in the tenth century b.c. with an Aramaean 
military offensive against Assyria, the close of this first act left the 
Aramaeans prostrate and the Assyrians triumphant. In the course of 
the ninth century b.c. the territories in Mesopotamia and the Upper 
Tigris Basin that had previously been overrun by Aramaean tribes were 
conquered by the Assyrians and converted into provinces of an Assyrian 
Empire. But the very thoroughness with which the subjugated Aramaeans 
were incorporated into an Assyrian body politic gave them an opening 
in the second act of the play for a peaceful penetration of the Babylonic 
body social which these foiled aggressors had never achieved so long as 
they had been on the war-path; and in this second act the Aramaeans’ 
cultural conquest of their military conquerors proceeded pari passu 
with the extension of the Assyrians’ domination over the Syriac World. 

Between the accession of Tiglath-Pileser III in 746 b.c. and the 
annihilation of the last Assyrian army at HarrSn in 610-609 b.c. an 
expanding Assyrian Power followed up its victory over the Aramaean 
peoples east of the Middle Euphrates by extending its operations to the 
west bank of the river and subduing all the Aramaean, Phoenician, and 
Hebrew communities in the homeland of the Syriac Civilization except 
the single Philistine city-state of Gaza and a still precariously independent 
Hebrew principality of Judah. 1 The Assyrian empire-builders sought to 
make their hold on their new conquests permanent by forcibly redistri¬ 
buting the conquered populations; 3 and, although in the event this 
inhuman Assyrian practice failed to achieve its perpetrators’ political 
purpose, it made its mark on History by assisting the Assyrians’ victims 

1 Matt. v. 5. 

2 When a Judah that had just escaped falling into Assyrian hands in 700 b.c. was 
carried away captive in 597 and 586 B.C. by the Assyrians' Babylonian heirs, the only 
provinces of the Syriac World that still remained unscathed by Babylonic militarism 
were the Phoenicians’ colonial domain in the Western basin of the Mediterranean, which 
was insulated by the Sea, and Arabia Felix (the Yaman), which was insulated by Arabian 
deserts (the Najd and the Hijaz). 

2 Sec VI. vii. 111-12 and 114-17. 



ENCOUNTERS WITH THE SYRIAC WORLD 441 
to win a cultural victory which the Assyrian aggressors had not foreseen 
and which the broken Syriac peoples had not sought. 

The ‘displaced persons’ whom the Assyrians deported from a con¬ 
quered Syria to their dominions east of Euphrates reinforced the 
previously conquered Aramaean representatives of the Syriac Civili¬ 
zation in Mesopotamia; this reinforcement gave an impetus to the 
pacific cultural encroachments which the Mesopotamian Aramaeans had 
already been beginning to make upon the Babylonic Civilization’s domain; 
and, before Assyria’s fall, a thus potently intensified eastward-streaming 
radiation of the Syriac culture had produced signal effects that were 
never to be undone. By the end of the seventh century b.c. the Syriac 
culture had not only made a lodgement within the Babylonic body 
social; its influence had penetrated beyond the Babylonic World’s 
easternmost outposts into a no-man’s-land tenanted by Iranian bar¬ 
barians, to compete there with the influence of the Babylonic culture 
itself for the conversion of these receptive barbarians’ souls; and in the 
sixth century b . c . a third act of the play was opened by a dramatic 
reversal, through Iranian intervention, of the relations in which the 
Syriac and Babylonic societies had stood to one another since the ninth 
century, when the Assyrians had established their military and political 
ascendancy over the Aramaeans. The liquidation of the Neo-Babylonian 
Empire by the Achaemenid empire-builder Cyrus in 539-538 b . c . did 
not merely liberate the Jews and the Syrophoenicians from a Babylonian 
yoke; it actually raised them, as we have seen , 1 to the status of privileged 
partners of the new Persian masters of South-Western Asia; and this 
change in the Syriac peoples' political fortunes had latent cultural 
corollaries which revealed themselves in the sequel. 

Achaemenids who, on the political plane, had sought to insure their 
rdgime against any risk of a revival of the liquidated Neo-Babylonian 
Empire by pursuing an anti-Babylonian policy of putting down the 
mighty from their seat and exalting the humble and meek 2 had at the 
same time started their imperial career on the cultural plane as still 
unquestioning proselytes of the Babylonic Civilization. The imperial 
archives at the newly created imperial residence Perscpolis in Pcrsis, as 
well as those at the ancient capital city Susa in Elam, were recorded, 
more Babylonico, on clay tablets in cuneiform characters in the Elamite 
language; and the same Babylonic script was employed in the trilingual 
inscriptions on imperial monuments—such as Darius I’s record, on the 
rock at Bchistan, of his acts in the Year of Insurrection—for the con¬ 
veyance of all three imperial languages—Elamite for Susa, Akkadian 
for Babylon, and Medo-Pcrsian for Ecbatana and Persepolis—in which 
these Achaemenian imperial inscriptions were presented. To convey 
the Iranian imperial people’s previously unwritten Medo-Pcrsian mother 
tongue, a special version of the cuneiform script was expressly devised . 3 

These early Achaemenian measures in the domain of language and 
writing signified a Persian reception of the Babylonic culture which the 
Persian heirs of the Neo-Babylonian Empire doubtless took as a matter 
of course; but the rival Syriac culture revealed its competitive power of 

* On pp. 425-6, above. » Luke i. 52. * See V. v. 123, n. 2, and VI. %-ii. 247. 



442 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
counter-attraction in the no less significant Achaemenian act of state by 
which the Aramaic language and alphabet were given official currency 
in all Achaemenian territories west of the Euphrates, 1 including Egypt 
and Anatolia, where Aramaic was not indigenous even as a vernacular, as 
well as Syria, where Aramaic was already replacing a Canaanitc language 
that had been the vernacular of Phoenicia and Judaea; and this propaga¬ 
tion of the Aramaic language and alphabet through Persian agency 
among the Persians’ non-Aramaean subjects in the West was the prelude 
to a reception of the Syriac culture in an Aramaic medium by the 
Persians themselves. An Iranian people that had entered on its imperial 
career in the sixth century b.c. under the spell of the Babylonic culture 
had already transferred its cultural allegiance from the Babylonic to the 
Syriac Civilization before the Achaemenian Empire was overthrown by 
Alexander. The faultiness of the later Achaemenian inscriptions in 
Persian cuneiform suggests that the version of a Babylonic script which 
the Persians had invented for their own use had never gained popular 
currency; 1 and in the post-Achaemenian Age the Iranians were writing 
their Middle Persian mother tongue in the Aramaic Alphabet and were 
even using Aramaic words written in the Aramaic Alphabet as ideo¬ 
grams to stand for their Iranian synonyms. 3 

The post-Achaemenian Age that thus saw the Syriac Society consum¬ 
mate its captivation of once barbarian Iranians who had taken their first 
lesson in civilization from Babylonic instructors was an age of Hellenic 
military and political ascendancy in South-West Asia and Egypt; and 
the same age also saw the same Syriac Society achieve the still greater 
triumphs of defeating the Hellenic Society in a competition for the 
cultural conversion of the Babylonic and Egyptiac worlds, and dividing 
the honours with its Hellenic rival in a contemporary struggle for win¬ 
ning the cultural allegiance of the debris of a broken Hittitc Society 
astride the Taurus. It was assuredly no accident that the Syriac Society’s 
most substantial successes in the peaceful penetration of neighbouring 
worlds should have been gained after the fall of an Achaemenian Power 
which had patronized the Syriac culture because it had been the political 
patron of the Syriac peoples. The antagonism which the Achaemenian 
rdgime had evoked in Babylonic and Egyptiac souls had checked the 
spontaneous reception of the Syriac culture in these two worlds more 
effectively than the Achaemenian Government’s official patronage could 
ever promote it; and, when this compromising political association was 
brought to an end by the liquidation of the Achaemenian Empire, the 
Syriac Civilization found its opportunities for cultural conquest en¬ 
hanced under an Hellenic political regime which did not show its Syriac 
subjects any embarrassing favours. 

The victory of the Syriac over the Hellenic culture in Babylonia under 
a post-Achaemenian Hellenic regime was notable because, of all the 
Achaemcnids’ former subjects, the Babylonians were the most readily 
inclined to welcome their new Hellenic rulers as deliverers from an 
odious Achaemenian yoke. 4 Yet, under a philobabylonian Selcucid 

' See V. v. 123, n. 2, and 499, and VI. vii. 248-9. 1 Sec V. v. 123, n. 2. 

> See I. i. 80 and 81, n. 3. 4 See V. v. 94 and 347. 



ENCOUNTERS WITH THE SYRIAC WORLD 443 
regime, a handful of Babylonian scholars and astronomers who frater¬ 
nized with their Greek confreres in a joint pursuit of esoteric common 
intellectual interests weighed as dust in the balance against the tens 
and hundreds of thousands of their compatriots who were taking to 
speaking Aramaic instead of Akkadian and writing, if literate, in the 
Alphabet instead of in cuneiform. This eviction of the native Babylonic 
script and language by more convenient Aramaic substitutes for them 
was a process which had begun in the Babylonic World in the days of the 
Assyrian Empire; 1 and it was completed by the simultaneous extinction 
of cuneiform and Akkadian in the first century- of the Christian Era, 
under the rule of the Seleucids’ barbarian Arsacid successors. 2 

In Assyria and Babylonia, as in Palestine and Phoenicia, the spread of 
the Aramaic tongue—which in the Babylonic World was a carrier of 
the Syriac culture—was facilitated by a kinship between the intrusive 
language and the sister Semitic native language that it was replacing; 
and in Babylonia the invading Syriac culture enjoyed, after its recep¬ 
tion in Iran, the further advantage of encircling its victim. In Egypt, 
on the other hand, an invading Syriac culture whose homeland was 
still nearer to Egypt than it was to Babylonia, and whose competi¬ 
tion with Hellenism for the cultural conquest of Egypt was not handi¬ 
capped by any Egyptian counterpart of a Babylonic philhellenism, was 
at the same time at a relative disadvantage in being unable to overwhelm 
its victim by an encircling movement and unable to coax him into 
conversion by offering him, as the vehicle of the new culture that he was 
being invited to adopt, a language that had a manifest affinity with his 
own. On this linguistic ground the Syriac culture’s Hellenic competitor 
was, of course, at an equal disadvantage in Egypt; but, when we proceed 
with our comparison of the two rival missionary cultures’ respective 
strengths and weaknesses in Egypt as contrasted with Babylonia, we 
perceive that an Egypt that was not appreciably closer than Babylonia 
was to Syria and Mesopotamia was within far shorter range and easier 
reach than Babylonia was of the homeland of Hellenism in the Aegean 
Basin; and we also observe that Hellenism was in a position to employ 
against Egypt the manoeuvre of encirclement that was being employed 
by the Syriac culture against Babylonia, since Egypt was exposed to a 
convergent radiation of Hellenic influence from the rapidly Hellenized 
city-states of Philistia on the east as well as from the colonial Greek city- 
states of Cyrenaica on her western flank. 

The militant Egyptiac reaction against Hellenic rule which declared 
itself at the turn of the third and second centuries B.c. retarded the 
Hcllcnization of Egypt without benefiting Hellenism’s Syriac rival, 
since the xenophobia that had come to be the dominant vein in the 
Egyptiac ethos by that date was too rabid to draw nice distinctions 
between the peculiar horrors of Phoenician, Jewish, and Greek pariahs; 
and, when in the third century of the Christian Era the native body 
social of an Egypt under Roman rule had been superficially assimilated 
to a genuinely Greek Alexandria and Ptolemais by being given a veneer 


I See I. i. 79. 

1 See p. 125, n. 3. correcting I. i. 79-80 and II. 



444 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
of what purported to be Hellenic municipal institutions, 1 it might have 
seemed as if, whatever the ultimate destinies of Hellenism in Egypt 
might be, Hellenism’s Syriac competitor, at any rate, was now here out 
of the running. Nor were these prospects materially changed by the 
contemporary conversion of Egypt to Christianity; for the oecumenical 
Catholicism that was the original form in which an Helleno-Syriac 
higher religion was received in Egypt was conveyed in the media of the 
Greek language and Hellenic philosophy. The victory in Egypt which 
was eventually gained over Hellenism after all by a Syriac Civilization 
whose prospects had long since apparently dwindled to vanishing-point 
was the consequence of a common movement in the Egyptiac and Syriac 
worlds to declare their independence of Hellenism in the arena of Chris¬ 
tian theological controversy by seceding from a Hellenizing Catholic 
Church to a Monophysitism which could be made the symbol and instru¬ 
ment of an anti-Hellenic reversion to the traditions of a native culture. 

This movement started in Egypt when the stubbornly un-Hcllcnizcd 
and covertly anti-Hellenic rural mass of the Egyptian people ran away 
with a Monophysitism that had first been conceived in the polemical 
minds of Alexandrian Greek clerics as an incident in a theological war¬ 
fare between Alexandria and Constantinople which was a reflection of 
the rivalry between these two competing focuses of a Christian Hellenic 
culture. Before the close of the fifth century of the Christian Era the 
native Egyptians had converted this family quarrel within the bosom 
of the Hellenic World into a new expression of the Egyptiac World’s 
scven-hundred-years-old quarrel with a domineering Hellenism. But in 
the fifth century of the Christian Era, as in the seventh century b.c., a 
petrified Egyptiac Society lacked the strength to evict an alien oppressor 
without the support of an alien ally; and this indispensable alien aid, 
which the Salte Pharaohs had obtained by enlisting the military services 
of Ionian and Carian ‘Brazen men from the Sea', was found by the fifth- 
ccntury Egyptian fathers of a Coptic Monophysite Church in an ecclesi¬ 
astical alliance with Syriac fellow Monophysites in the Asiatic dominions 
of the Roman Empire south-east of the Amanus Range. 

This fraternization between a submerged Syriac and a submerged 
Egyptiac Society on the religious basis of a common Monophysitism 
confronted a moribund Hellenic ‘ascendancy’ with a mass-opposition in 
its Oriental dominions which it failed either to repress or to appease; 
and the sixth-century Syrian champion of Monophysitism, Ya'qub bar 
Addai, had virtually undone the Hellenizing work of Alexander the 
Great and his Macedonian and Roman successors before the seventh- 
century Muslim Arab barbarian invaders gave the Roman imperial 
regime in Syria and Egypt its coup de grdee . In thus shaking itself free 
at last from a long endured Hellenic yoke the Egyptiac Society was not, 
however, recovering its ancient cultural independence; it was escaping 
from a superficial Hellenization at the price of allowing itself to be 
absorbed into the body social of a Syriac Civilization that was no less 
alien to it than the Hellenic; and the Egyptiac World did not elude its 
fate by eschewing the reception of the latter-day Syriac versions of an 

1 See VI. vii. 50, and p. 408, above, and p. 586, below. 



ENCOUNTERS WITH THE SYRIAC WORLD 4 45 
Aramaic language and alphabet that had been the Syriac Society’s instru¬ 
ments for picking Babylonic locks. The Egyptians used their own living 
vernacular language as their literary vehicle for a Monophysite Christian 
liturgy and theology, and they took the Greek and not the Syriac Alpha¬ 
bet as the basis for the new script that they invented to convey their new 
Coptic ecclesiastical language; but the Syriac Civilization needed no 
linguistic key to open the door into an Egyptiac World which was now 
associated with the Syriac Society by the intimate fellowship of sharing 
a common Monophysite faith that was menaced by a common ‘Melchitc’ 
Hellenic adversary. The Egyptiac Society had already merged its long 
jealously preserved identity in the Syriac body social before the Roman 
regime in Egypt was liquidated by the Arabs; and this captivation of 
Egypt by the Syriac culture which the Monophysite movement had 
brought about was already complete before a majority of the people of 
Egypt underwent a further religious conversion from Monophysite 
Christianity to Islam and exchanged their ancestral Coptic mother 
tongue for Arabic. 1 

In the competition between the Syriac and Hellenic societies for the 
assimilation of the debris of a ruined Hittite Society astride the Taurus, 
a partition of the prize was dictated by Geography. An Achaemenian 
fiat could not avail to give the Aramaic language any effective currency in 
the former domain of the Lydian Empire in Western Anatolia, which 
was within point-blank range of the radiation of the Hellenic culture 
from its Aegean focus; and even in Cappadocia, where a convergent 
Hellenic radiation from Sinope and Ephesus was countered by the 
proximity of an Aramaic-speaking Syria and Mesopotamia and by the 
introduction, under the Achaemenian regime, of an Iranian feudal 
aristocracy and a Zoroastrian clergy, the final victory of Hellenism was 
demonstrated, as we have seen,* by the Hellenism of the fourth-century 
Cappadocian Fathers of the Orthodox Church. South of Taurus on the 
other hand—or at any rate east of Amanus, in Northern Syria—the 
absorption of the local Hittite communities into a Syriac body social was 

1 In Syria, Mesopotamia, and ‘Iraq, where at the time of the Arab conquest the 
current vernacular and literary language was the derivative of Aramaic known as Syriac, 
the Arabic language in and after the seventh century of the Christian Era enjoyed the 
same advantage as had been enjoyed by the Aramaic language in its own antecedent 
conquest of 'the Fertile Crescent. The transition from a Semitic Syriac to a likewise 
Semitic Arabic was as easy as the transition to a Semitic Aramaic from a likewise 
Semitic Canaanite and Akkadian. A Syriac-speaking 'Fertile Crescent' had, however, 
like a Coptic-speaking Egypt, already shaken itself free from Hellenism by embracing 
the anti-Hellenic Nestorun and Monophysite forms of Christianity before its military 
conquest by the Arabs and its subsequent linguistic conquest by Arabic. The role of the 
Arabs, their language, and their faith in helping to liberate a submerged Syriac World 
from the incubus of an intrusive Hellenism was subsidiary everywhere except in the 
Phoenicians' former colonial domain round the Western Mediterranean. In North-West 
Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, the Balearic Islands. Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica, the 
Arabic language and Islam were the instruments by which a Hellenism that, except 
in Sicily, was here clad in a Latin dress was evicted or submerged in the eighth and ninth 
centuries of the Christian Era. It is true that in North-West Africa a ‘native’ cultural 
reaction against an Hellenic ‘ascendancy’ had found a religious expression, three hundred 
years before the advent of Islam, in the fourth-century revolt of Donatism against 
Catholicism. But Donatism had never succeeded in winning the decisive victory over 
Catholicism in North-West Africa that Monophysitism had won over Catholicism in 
Egypt and Syria, and the mission of defeating Hellenism in the religious arena was thus 
left In North-West Africa for Islam to execute. * On p. 415, above. 



446 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
merely delayed, 1 without being permanently averted, when in the post- 
Alexandrine Age this region was intensively planted with Greek colonists by 
Antigonus Monophthalmus and Sclcucus NicatorandNicator’s Seleucid 
successors. The mass-secession of the rural population of Syria from a 
Hellenizing Catholic Christianity to an anti-Hellenic Monophysitism in 
the fifth and sixth centuries of the Christian Era made manifest the 
startling truth that an Antioch which had been founded as a base for 
Hellenic military and political power and as a transmitting station for 
the Hellenic culture was still, in the ninth century of her brilliant life, 
a closely invested Hellenic enclave in the midst of a beleaguering Syriac 
country-side whose passive siege of the intrusive alien imperial city had 
been invisibly maintained below the surface of a dispensation in which 
Hellenism had fancied itself to be dominant. 

The vastness of these pacific conquests which were achieved by the 
Syriac culture during an age of Hellenic ascendancy between the over¬ 
throw of the Achacmenian Empire and the establishment of the Arab 
Caliphate stands out in striking contrast to the frustration of contem¬ 
porary Syriac attempts to evict an Hellenic ‘ascendancy’ by force of arms. 
The Romans’ crushing defeat of a Maccabaean and Zealot Jewish 
advance-guard’s forlorn hope west of Euphrates is less impressive than 
their equal success in preventing an Arsacid and Sasanid Iranian main 
body of the militant Syriac opponents of Hellenism from making any 
permanent reconquests west of Iran and 'Iraq. 2 Khusru Parwlz’s Persian 
cavalry who forced their way as far west as Calchcdon in Asia and 
Tripoli in Africa during the last and most devastating of the Romano- 
Pcrsian wars (gerebatur a.d. 603-28) made no more lasting gains of 
territory than Pacorus’s Parthian cavalry who had ranged over Syria in 
51-50 and again in 40-38 b.c. A militancy which was thus so ineffective 
on its own plane did, however, make history on the religious plane by 
perversely distracting two higher religions from their oecumenical mis¬ 
sion of bringing human souls into a closer communion with God in 
order to enlist these churches as combatants in the trivial mundane 
military enterprise of liberating a subjugated Syriac Society’s domain 
from the incubus of an interloping Hellenic ‘ascendancy’ 3 —as the 
Nestorian and Monophysitc forms of Christianity were subsequently 
diverted from the service of Christianity’s authentic spiritual purpose 
to the role of being used as weapons by the Syriac Civilization in a mortal 
combat with Hellenism in an ecclesiastical arena. 

In a twentieth-century Westernizing World a Jewish and a Zoro- 
astrian Church whose origins could be traced back to the experiences of 
the internal proletariat of a disintegrating Babylonic Civilization 4 were 
still in existence side by side with four younger religions of the same 
species—Christianity, Islam, the MahSySna, and Hinduism—which had 
been brought to birth by similar experiences in the history of a disintegra¬ 
ting Hellenic Society. All six religions were still on the map, and all 
six had once made their epiphany in the World during the decline and 

1 It had begun as early as the fourteenth century* B.C. (see p. 506, n. 2, below). 

* See pp. 412-13, above. 

J Sec V. v. 124-7. 


♦ See V. v. 120-2 



ENCOUNTERS WITH THE EGYPTIAC WORLD 4 47 
fall of one of the civilizations of the second generation. 1 In the course 
of their subsequent histories, however, the post-Hellenic and the post- 
Babylonic group of higher religions had travelled along such widely 
divergent lines that, if the record of their origins had been lost, their 
specific affinity with one another might have been difficult to recognize. 
While the four post-Hellcnic religions had duly continued to fulfil their 
promise of preaching a gospel to all Mankind, Zoroastrianism and 
Judaism had found compensation for their mundane failure to liberate 
a subjugated Syriac Society from an Hellenic ‘ascendancy’ in their 
spiritually still more devastating subsequent mundane success in con¬ 
verting themselves into a ‘social cement’ possessing the astonishing 
property of being able to hold together a fossilized community in 
diaspori.* 

This parochial mundane task was as remote as any function could 
well be from the oecumenical otherworldly mission with which Judaism 
and Zoroastrianism, no less than their sister higher religions, had 
originally been charged; and on this showing the two post-Babylonic 
higher religions must be judged to have committed the sin or suffered 
the calamity of throwing away or losing their high spiritual birthright. 
The parallel history of the Ncstorian and Monophysite forms of 
Christianity, which likewise eventually converted themselves into a 
‘social cement’ for giving cohesion to fossilized communities in diaspord, 
indicates that the common aberration into which these two Syriacis- 
ing Christian churches and the two post-Babylonic higher religions fell 
was not the fore-ordained consequence of some original and intrinsic 
spiritual flaw in their doctrine, precept, and 6thos, but was the penalty 
for their historic error of allowing themselves to be caught in political 
entanglements; for all the Christian churches did not go the Mono- 
physitc and Nestorian way. When the Nestorian and Monophysite 
offshoots of Christianity took the fatal Jewish and Zoroastrian wrong 
turning, the main body of the Christian Church did not make the same 
mistake of allowing a mundane quarrel between Monophysites and 
‘Melchites’ to distract it irrevocably from the pursuit of its oecumenical 
otherworldly purpose. 

4. Encounters zeith the Egyptiac Civilization in the Age of 'the 
New Empire ' 1 

In a drama in which the Egyptiac Civilization was the protagonist, the 
opening gambit was the same as in the tragedy of the Babylonic Civiliza¬ 
tion, with the Egyptiac Society anticipating the Babylonic Society’s 
role, and the Hyksos barbarian invaders of Syria and Egypt setting in 
motion a tragic train of events by giving the same provocation to 
Egyptiac marchmen in the Thebaid as the Aramaean barbarian in¬ 
vaders of Mesopotamia were to give to the Assyrian wardens of the 
northern marches of the Babylonic World. In both tragedies a hard- 
pressed civilization responded to the challenge of barbarian aggression 

» The sequence of divers species of the genus Humin Society is set out in Tsble IV 
in VII. vii, facing p. 772. 


448 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

by succumbing to a militarism that had originally been foreign to its 
nature;' and in both, likewise, this militarism was eventually fatal to its 
addicts as well as to their victims. 

The temporary inundation of Egypt by the Hyksos in the seventeenth 
century B.c., like the tide of Aramaean aggression against Assyria in the 
eleventh and tenth centuries b.c., was a backwash from a cataclysm pro¬ 
duced by the dissolution of a neighbouring universal state. We have ob¬ 
served that the Aramaean assailants of Assyria were the extreme right wing 
of a host of Aramaean and Hebrew barbarians from the North Arabian 
Steppe whose main body had been drawn into a political vacuum in 
Syria arising from the collapse there of an Egyptian imperial regime in 
the fourteenth century b.c. In a different context 2 we have also noticed 
that the Hyksos conquerors of Egypt were the Canaanite counterparts of 
a host of Aryan Eurasian Nomad barbarians who in the eighteenth or the 
seventeenth century B.c. had poured into the derelict Mesopotamian, 
Anatolian, and Syrian domains of a Sumeric universal state that had 
fallen into decrepitude immediately after its ephemeral restoration by 
Hammurabi (imperabat 1792-1750 or 1728-1686 b.c.). j The Aramaeans’ 
challenge to Assyria provoked, as we have seen, an Assyrian assault in 
the ninth and eighth centuries b.c. upon a Syriac Civilization, affiliated 
to the Minoan, which had arisen meanwhile in the former Syrian domain 
of 'the New Empire’ of Egypt which the Mesopotamian Aramaeans’ 
kinsmen had invaded from the east. The Hyksos’ challenge to the 
Thebaid similarly provoked an Egyptian assault in the sixteenth and 
fifteenth centuries b.c. 4 upon an abortive First Syriac Civilization which 
—but for the Hyksos’ transgression against the Egyptiac World and the 
Theban liberators’ revanche —might have taken its place, side by side 
with the Hittite and the Babylonic Society, as one of the civilizations of 
the second generation which the disintegration of the Sumeric Civiliza¬ 
tion had brought to birth.* 

In following up their liberation of Egypt from the Hyksos by their 
conquest of their defeated Hyksos adversaries’ Syrian base of operations, 
the Theban militarists of the Eighteenth Pharaonic Dynasty not only 
prevented a Syriac Civilization affiliated to the Sumeric from coming to 
birth; they also brought the Egyptiac World into contact with the two 

1 In spite of the standing temptation to succumb to militarism by which Assyria 
was beset in her exposed position as an outpost—first of the Sumeric World and then of 
its Babylonic successor—the first appearance of the Assyrians on the stage of History 
was in the guise of peaceful men of business whose commercial colonies in Eastern 
Anatolia in the third millennium b.c. had to be rescued from ill-treatment at the hands 
of a native ruler by military action on the part of the Akkadian militarist Sargon of 
Agade (see I. i. i to, with n. 3). It required the two successive challenges of a Mitannian 
and an Aramaean oppression to convert the Assyrian traders of the third millennium 
into the Assyrian warriors of the last. In a pacific-minded Egyptiac World the wardens 
of the southern marches over against the barbarians of the Upper Nile Valley had always 
been exceptions to the general rule of the Egyptiac £thos; and this explains why ‘the 
Old Kingdom’, ‘the Middle Empire’, and 'the New Empire’ in turn all owed their forc¬ 
ible establishment to the military prowess of southern empire-builder3 (see II. ii. 112). 
The violence of the xenophobia evoked in Egyptiac souls by the Hyksos domination 
enabled the Theban liberators of Lower Egypt from the Hyksos yoke temporarily to 
communicate the traditional militarism of the Thebaid to the rest of the Egyptiac 
World. 2 I n H, ii. 388-91. 

J See the Note on Chronology in vol. x, pp. 167-212, below. 

* Sec V. vi. 198-9. s See II. ii. 388-91. 



ENCOUNTERS WITH THE EGYPTIAC WORLD 449 

post-Sumeric civilizations that did succeed in establishing themselves. 
The contact with a nascent Babylonic World did not evoke any appre¬ 
ciable reaction, since the Babylonic march-state, Assyria, had as much 
as she could do from the seventeenth to the fourteenth century b.c. in 
saving herself from being overwhelmed by a successor-state of the 
defunct Empire of Sumer and Akkad which had been established in 
Mesopotamia by the Aryan Eurasian Nomad barbarian Mitannians, 1 
while the interior of the Babylonic World was lying torpid under the 
sluggish rule of the highlander barbarian Kassitcs. On the other hand, 
in impinging on a nascent Hittite Society that was taking shape in the 
Empire of Sumer and Akkad’s former East Anatolian domain, the 
Theban builders of an Egyptian Empire in South-West Asia involved 
the Egyptiac Society in a hundred years’ war (gerebatur circa 1370- 
1278 b.c.) for supremacy in South-West Asia which, like the latter-day 
Romano-Persian contest for the same elusive prize, was as exhausting 
to both combatants as it was inconclusive in its political results. 

In this case, as in that, a barbarian onlooker was the tertius gaudem; 
and, when an avalanche of mass-migration set in motion by the death- 
agonies of a moribund Minoan World descended upon the Hittite 
Empire and the Egyptian Empire in succession, the Hittites suffered at 
the Sea Peoples’ hands what was to be the Persians’ fate, and the 
Egyptians what was to be the Romans’, at the hands of the Arabs. The 
Hittite Power was annihilated, while the Egyptian Imperial Government 
just succeeded, by a supreme effort, in saving the homeland of the 
Egyptiac Civilization in the Nile Valley at the price of abandoning the 
residue of its former dominions in Syria. 1 

1 See the Note on Chronology in vol. x. pp. 199-201. 

* In the fourteenth and thirteenth centuries B.C. the Hittite Power was in contact, not 
only with ‘the New Empire’ of Egypt in Syria, but with an Achaean Power along the 
south-west coast of Anatolia. An exhaustive treatment of the relations between the 
Hittites and the Achacans, in the light of all the evidence known to Modem Western 
scholars at the time, will be found in C. Schachermeyr’s Hethiter und Ach&tr (Leipzig 
1935, Harrassowitz). Schachermeyr marshals convincing arguments in favour of the 
tentative conclusion that the Achaean Power which figures in the archives of the Hittite 
imperial capital Boghazqat'eh was identical with the Power whose imperial capital was 
Mycenae and whose ’thalassocracy' in the Aegean in the fourteenth and thirteenth cen¬ 
turies B.c. was the prize of a victorious assault upon an antecedent Minoan ’thalassocracy’ 
whose imperial capital had been Cnossos. 

In contrast to the hostility which was the usual relation between Khatti and Egypt 
during the hundred years ending in the peace settlement of 1278 b.c., the contemporary 
relations between Khatti and the Achaean ’thalassocracy’ seem usually to have been 
friendly. When the Hittite Emperor MurftiliS 11 was suffering from an illness in the fourth 
year of a reign which approximately coincided with the third quarter of the fourteenth 
century, 'the god of Akhkhiyawa’ was one of three divinities who were brought to his 
bedside to heal him; and this evidence of mutual goodwill is the more remarkable con¬ 
sidering that by that date the Achaean Power had already crossed the Hittite Power’s 
political path by establishing a bridgehead on the mainland of Anatolia in Millawanda 
(Schachermeyr, op. cit., p. 44; G6tze, A.: ‘Die Annalen des MuriiliS’, in MitttUmgtn 
dcr Vo'deratiaiisch-Aegyptiichen Gesellschafl, 38. Band (Leipzig 1933, Hinrichs), p. 
37)—a locality adjoining Lukina which appears, on the evidence of place-names men¬ 
tioned in the Hittite documents (Schachermeyr, op. cit., p. 67), to have lain in South- 
Western Caria, even if we do not identify the name Millawanda itself with the Miletus 
of the Hellenic geographers gazetteer. 

The delicate situation arising out of this encroachment by the sea-power on the land- 
power’s clement seems to have been handled on both sides with sufficient tact to prevent 
it from resulting in a war when, at some subsequent date which may have been before 
the end of MurStliS II’* reign (ibid., p. 45), a Hittite subject named Piamaradu took refugo 
in Millawanda with seven thousand adherents, and gave his two daughters in marriage 

B 2808 .vin Q 



450 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

If this were the whole story of the encounters with the Egyptiac 
Civilization in the age of ‘the New Empire’, it would have little sig¬ 
nificance for the student of History-; but in this instance a familiar talc 
of aggression, revenge, and mutual exhaustion is redeemed by one flash of 
revelation in a single soul. As far as we know, Ikhnaton was the first of 
the sons of Man to apprehend the unity and universality of God ;* and 
this Pisgah-sight unfolded itself to the eyes of the seer from the eminence 
of an imperial throne which, under its oecumenical dominion, had 
brought the Egyptiac World into association with an alien civilization in 
Syria 2 and with a primitive culture in the Upper Nile Valley. 

‘The lands of Syria and Nubia and the land of Egypt—Thou puttest 
every man in his place and Thou suppliest their needs.... Thou art lord of 
them all, who wearieth himself on their behalf; the lord of every land, 
who ariseth from them.... All far-off peoples—Thou makest that whereon 
they live.’* 

If the philosopher Ikhnaton had not also been the Emperor Amenhotep 
IV, he might never have beheld a vision which an oecumenical autocrat’s 


to two Achaean subjects who were then holding Millawanda on their sovereign’s behalf. 
When representations from the Court of Khatti to the Court of Akhkhiyawa on the sub¬ 
ject of Piamaradu’s future met with a reply which the Court of Khatti felt to be un¬ 
satisfactory, the Hittitc Emperor put himself politically in the wrong by invading 
Millawanda without gaining his object of laying hands on Piamanidu. The Hittitc 
refugee and his adherents avoided capture by taking ship from Millawanda to some 
adjacent overseas portion of the King of Akhkhiyawa’9 dominions, from which they 
threatened to make descents upon the Hittitc coasts. Thereupon the Hittitc Emperor 
wrote a further letter to the Achaean King, apologizing for his occupation of Milla¬ 
wanda and requesting him either to banish Piamaradu from his dominions altogether or, 
as an alternative, to intem him somewhere in the metropolitan territories of the Achaean 
Empire where he would be at a greater distance from the Hittitc Empire’s frontiers. 

This fragment of Hittite-Achacan diplomatic correspondence (summarized ibid., pp. 
30 - 33 ) that had been retrieved by Modem Western archaeologists threw a flicker of light 
on an Hellenic legend that had been noticed by Thucydides in the introduction (Book I, 
chap. 9) to his history of the Atheno-Pcloponnesian War of 431-404 B.C. According to 
this story the Peloponnesus derived its name from an Anatolian adventurer named Pclops, 
who had won the principality of Pisa for himself by a piece of sharp practice and had 
afterwards secured a footing at Mycenae by giving his daughter in marriage to the reign¬ 
ing Perscid King Sthcnclus. On the strength of this family alliance, Pelops' son Atreus 
had managed to succeed his nephew Eurystheu*—Sthenclus’s son and Pelops’grandson 
—on the throne of Mycenae. In this Hellenic legend the Hittite Emperor Muriilii II 
figures as Myrtilus, the prince of Pisa's charioteer, whom Pclops first induced to betray 
his master and then liquidated by pushing him over a cliff into the sea. Docs Pelops 
derive his own name from the Hittite Empire’s frontier province Pal 5 ? And is Atreus a 
legendary ghost of the historical Achaean buccaneer Attarissiya, who made himself a 
nuisance to the Hittitc Empire in the reigns of Tutkhaliya IV (imperabat circa 1260-1230 
B.c.) and Arnuwanda (imperabat circa 1230-1215 B.C.) oy driving the Emperor’s feuda¬ 
tory MadduwattaS out of his fief and by making a descent upon Cyprus (ibid., pp. 4 t 


GesclUchaft (E.V.), 32. Jahrgang (Leipzig 1927, Hinrichs), pp. u, 15-17, and 39)? 

The present footnote replaces V. v. 237, n. 7. 

1 See I. i. 145-6 and V. v. 695- 

2 The century immediately preceding Ikhnaton’s accession to the Egyptiac imperial 
throne had seen an influx into Egypt of foreigners of all races from all quarters—first 
in military, then in civil, employments. Imported foreign slaves had risen in the Egyptiac 
social scale to a level above that of the native Egyptiac peasantry, and the Egyptians 
with whom these immigrants had intermingled had been adopting Syrian and Myce¬ 
naean manners and customs and cults (see Wilson, J. A.: The Burden of Egypt (Chicago 
Z 95 L University of Chicago Press), pp. 186-93). The Imperial House set an example 
when Thothmes IV married a daughter of King Artatama of Mitanni; and there were 
at least two more royal marriages between the Egyptian and the Mitannian dvnasty 
(Wilson, op. cit., pp. 201-2). This was the historical background to Ikhnaton’s new 
departures in the realms of religion, the visual arts, and literature. 

3 Ikhnaton’s hymn to the Aton (Sun-Disk), quoted in V. vi. 11-12. 



TARES AND WHEAT 451 

political vantage-point could bring within his ken, even though his 
political authority might be impotent to impose upon the rank-and-file 
of his subjects the chillingly intellectual and at the same time disturb¬ 
ingly revolutionary theology and liturgy in which the imperial recluse 
sought to communicate his personal religious experience to an intimate 
circle of courtier-initiates. 1 


5. Tares and Wheat 

Our survey of encounters between contemporaries has made us 
aware that the only fruitful results of these encounters are the works of 
peace, and most mournfully aware that these creatively peaceful inter¬ 
changes of ideas and ideals are rare indeed by comparison with the 
frequency of the stultifying and disastrous conflicts that arc apt to arise 
when two or more diverse cultures come into contact with one another. 

If we scan once more the panorama of encounters between civilizations 
of the second generation, we shall observe in the intercourse between 
the Indie and the Sinic civilization one instance of a peaceful interchange 
which seems as fruitful as at first sight it seems free from the blight of 
violence. The Mahayana was transmitted to the Sinic from the Indie 
World without the two societies ever falling into war with one another, 
and the peacefulness of the intercourse that produced this historic effect 
was advertised in the traffic of Buddhist missionaries en route from 
India to China, and Buddhist pilgrims en route from China to India, 
which found its way to and fro by both the sea-route via the Straits of 
Malacca and the land-route via the Tarim Basin from the fourth to the 
seventh century of the Christian Era. 

During this age of peaceful religious intercourse the only incident 
remotely resembling a passage of arms between a Chinese and an Indian 
Great Power was one highly creditable act of intervention on the 
Chinese side in Indian circumstances that forced Chinese hands. On the 
morrow of the death of an Hellenic Justinian’s Indie counterpart Harsha 
(1 imperabat a.d. 606-47)* at the close of the last phase of the disintegra¬ 
tion of the Indie Society, an envoy from the T’ang Emperor T’ai Tsung 
who happened at that moment to be on his way to the dead Indie 
emperor’s court retorted to an Indian usurper’s murderous attack upon 
his mission by evacuating his people from Hindustan to Tibet, enlisting 
Tibetan and Nepalese reinforcements, and re-entering India manu 
militari without yielding to the temptation to which this Chinese warrior- 
statesman’s Bactrian Greek predecessor Demetrius had succumbed in 
the second century b.c. Instead of taking advantage of the anarchy into 
which India had fallen after the disappearance from the scene of the last 
upholder of a crumbling Indie universal state, the enterprising repre¬ 
sentative of the T’ang Power in the seventh century of the Christian Era 
exhibited a political disinterestedness that was as remarkable as his 
military efficiency. After occupying the last Indie emperor’s derelict 

1 Ikhnaton’s failure to impose his Aton-worship in the Egyptiac World has been 
discussed in V. v. 695-6. An authoritative discussion of it is now to be found in Wilson, 
J. A.: The Burden 0/ Egypt (Chicago 1951, University of Chicago Press), pp. 206-235. 



452 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

dominions in a lightning campaign, capturing the usurper, and restoring 
order, the ambassador was content to evacuate India for the second 
time, and this time under no compulsion, with his trouble-making 
prisoner in his train as the only trophy of a beneficent military triumph. 1 

This politico-military episode in the history of the relations between a 
Far Eastern and an Indie Power is on the same high moral level as the 
contemporary religious activities of Chinese pilgrims and Indian mis¬ 
sionaries; yet our idyllic picture of a pacific encounter between two 
civilizations resulting in the transmission of the Mahayana to the Far 
East is incomplete and to that extent misleading; for the opening up of 
the overland route between India and China via the Tarim Basin— 
which was in use earlier than the maritime route and, till after the seventh 
century, was also always the more regularly frequented of the two—was 
the work, not of the Indie and Sinic societies themselves, but of the 
Bactrian Greek pioneers of an intrusive Hellenic Society and these 
Greeks’ Kushan barbarian successors; and the establishment of an over¬ 
land line of communications between the Indie and the Sinic World by 
Bactrian Greek and Kushan hands was an incidental result of military 
aggression on the Bactrian Greeks’ part against the Mauryan Empire at 
a moment when it was impotent to defend itself, and on the Kushans’ 
part against the Han Empire’s domain in the Tarim Basin in a militarily 
opportune hour after the Prior Han Dynasty had lost their grip and 
before the Posterior Han had mustered the strength to vindicate their 
title to their predecessors’ lost dominion. 

If we arc in search of an instance of a spiritually fruitful encounter 
between contemporaries in which there is no evidence at all of any con¬ 
comitant military conflict, we shall have to look farther back into the 
past than the age of the civilizations of the second generation to a time 
before the Egyptiac Civilization had been galvanized by the shock of the 
Hyksos invasion into an unnatural prolongation of an already completed 
term of life. 2 In the preceding age, from the turn of the twenty-second 
and twenty-first centuries to the turn of the eighteenth and seventeenth 
centuries b.c., an Egyptiac universal state in the shape of ‘the Middle 
Empire’ and a Sumeric universal state in the shape of the Empire of 
Sumer and Akkad had been living side by side with one another, 3 and 
alternating in the exercise of an hegemony over the Syrian land-bridge 
between their homelands, without, so far as is known, ever falling into 
a clash of arms. This apparently peaceful contact between the Egyptiac 
and Sumeric societies during their last rally before their final dissolu- 

' Sec Smith, V. A.: The Early History of India, 3rd ed. (Oxford 1914, Clarendon 
Press), pp. 352-3; Eliot, Sir C.: Hinduism and Buddhism (London 1921, Arnold, 3 vol*.), 
vol. in, p. 260. 

2 This effect of the impact of the Hyksos on the course of Egyptiac history has been 
discussed in I. i. 136-46. 

3 In reckoning that the Empire of Sumer and Akkad, from its first foundation by 
Ur-Engur (alias Ur-Nammu) of Ur down to its decay after the death of Hammurabi, 
began and ended at approximately the same dates as a ‘Middle Empire' of Egypt which 
was founded by a Mentuhotcp and was overthrown by the Hyksos, we arc adopting 
a revised estimate of Sumeric chronology which places all the principal dates of Sumeric 
history 155 years later according to Sidney Smith, or 219 years later according to W. F. 
Albright, than they were placed by Eduard Meyer in the light of the scantier archaeo¬ 
logical evidence at his command (see the Note on Chronology in vol. x, pp. 167-212). 



TARES AND WHEAT 453 

tion was, however, apparently also sterile; and wc have to look still 
farther back than this to find a transaction between these two civiliza¬ 
tions of the first generation that was not merely untarnished by violence 
but was productive of spiritual effects comparable to the transmission 
of the MahSySna from India to the Far East. 

In the investigation of so early a chapter in the histories of civiliza¬ 
tions the knowledge gradually accumulated by the progress of Modern 
Western archaeological discovery still left the twentieth-century histor¬ 
ian groping in an historical twilight in which all outlines remained un¬ 
certain and all movements elusive; yet, subject to this caution, wc may 
recall here our tentative finding 1 that the worship of Isis and Osiris, 
which came to play so vital a part in Egyptiac spiritual life after the 
Egyptiac Society’s breakdown, was not the original expression of an 
indigenous spiritual experience but was a gift from a disintegrating 
Sumeric World 1 where the heart-rending yet hcart-consoling figures of 
the Sorrowing Wife or Mother and her Suffering Husband or Son had 
made their earliest epiphany under the names Ishtar and Tammuz. If it 
be indeed true that a worship which was the harbinger of all other higher 
religions was transmitted from the society in which it had first arisen to 
the children of a contemporary civilization without the sinister strife and 
bloodshed by which so many of the subsequent encounters between 
contemporaries were to be marred, we may have caught here one glimpse 
of a bow in the cloud that lowers over the histories of those contacts 
between civilizations in which the parties to the encounter have met one 
another in the flesh. 

1 In V. v. 81-82 and 147-52. 

1 If the worship of Ishtar and Tammuz was in truth a response to the challenge of 
social disintegration, its epiphany in the Sumeric World, and a fortiori its radiation 
from the Sumeric World into the Egyptiac World, cannot have taken place earlier, at 
the earliest, than a date mid-way through the third millenium B.C. If so, this was not the 
first encounter between these two civilizations of which there was a record. Material 
evidence, brought to light by twentieth-century Western archaeologists, testified that 
several elements of Sumeric technology and artistic style, perhaps even including the 
happy thought of revolutionizing the art of writing by eliciting phonemes out of picto- 
crams, had been conveyed from Shinar to Egypt in the closing centuries of an Egyptiac 
Late Predynastic Age, at some date during the second half of the fourth millennium B.C. 
(see Wilson, J. A.: The Durden of Egypt (Chicago 1951, University of Chicago Press), 
pp. 37-38, and the present Study, X. ix. 682-92). The worship of Ishtar and Tammuz 
will have come to Egypt from Shinar in the same age as these material culture-elements, 
if we are to believe that the East Deltaic group of Egyptiac divinities, in which Osiris 
makes his first appearance, took shape in the Predynastic Age as early as the Nagnda II 
period, circa 3500 b.c. (sec Scharff, A.: Die Ausbreitung des Osiriskultes in dcr FrQhseit 
und u'dhrend des Alien Reiches (Munich 1948, Biederstein), p. 17), and that the worship 
of Osiris spread from Busiris to Heliopolis in the age of the First and Second Dynasties 
(ibid., p. 19). The earliest extant inscriptions of the Pyramid Texts, which are our 
earliest evidence for the practice of Osiris-worship, are on monuments of the Fifth and 
Sixth Dynasties (ibid., p. 16). 



C. THE DRAMA OF ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN 
CONTEMPORARIES (STRUCTURE, 
CHARACTERS, AND PLOT) 

(I) CONCATENATIONS OF ENCOUNTERS 


T HE foregoing survey of encounters between contemporaries has 
made it apparent that these are dramas in which the number of the 
dramatis personae is apt to be greater than the minimum cast of two 
figures. Encounters t£te-a-t£tc, like the spiritual commerce between the 
Sumcric and the Egyptiac Civilization which may have carried the rudi¬ 
ments of a higher religion from the banks of the Euphrates to the banks 
of the Nile, 1 seem to be less frequent than encounters between three 
parties, such as the triangular contests for command of the Mediter¬ 
ranean Basin between the Phoenicians, Etruscans, and Hellenes of a pre- 
Alexandrine Age* and between the Medieval Westerners, the Eastern 
Orthodox Christians, and the Monophysitc Christian and Muslim repre¬ 
sentatives of a Syriac Society in a belated last chapter of its history. 3 

A not less frequent and perhaps more characteristic type of encounter 
is a contest between a protagonist and a deuteragonist for physical and 
spiritual dominion over weaker competitors. The second of the two 
triangular contests for the military, political, and commercial control of 
the Mediterranean Basin turned into a competition between the Franks 
and the 'Osmanlis for the subjugation and conversion of Eastern Ortho¬ 
dox Christians whose failure to hold their own against their two potently 
aggressive neighbours had left them no freedom except to make an un¬ 
palatable choice between these two alternative alien ways of life * but 
usually the destiny of more than one wilting society seems to be at stake 
in such struggles for possession of souls. The Syriac Society wrestled 
with the post-Alexandrine Hellenic Society for the conversion of the 
Babylonic and Egyptiac societies as well as for the conversion of the 
fossilized remnants of a Hittite Society that lay directly in the fairway 
between the homelands of the two rivals; 3 and, in a latter-day world that 
had been unified on the technological and economic plane on a literally 
oecumenical scale by the Modern Western feat of mastering the Ocean, 
the Russian offshoot of the Orthodox Christian Society had armed itself 
with the weapons of a Modem Western technique in order to challenge 
the Western Society’s influence over all the other living civilizations and 
primitive societies. 6 

We may now go on to observe that these dramatic encounters between 
contemporaries are complex not merely in the point of being apt to 
bring a considerable number of characters on to the stage but also in the 
further point of being implicated with one another like the successive 
tragedies in an Attic trilog}'. The discovery that encounters between 
contemporaries may present themselves, not singly, but in concatena- 

1 See pp. 452-3, above. _ * See pp. 418-39, above. 

* See pp. 346-^03, above. 4 Sec p. 151, with n. 2, and pp. 395-7, above. 

s Sec pp. 442-6, above. 4 Sec pp. 126-49, above. 


CONCATENATIONS OF ENCOUNTERS 4 5 S 
tions, was made in the fifth century b.c. by the pre-Alexandrine Hellenic 
historian Herodotus when he set himself the ambitious task of giving an 
illuminating account of the then still recent military and political conflict 
between the Achaemcnian Empire and the independent Hellenic city- 
states in Continental European Greece. Herodotus’s artistic genius 
divined that, in order to make his story intelligible, he must place it in 
the setting of its historical antecedents; in viewing it from this angle, he 
perceived that the Graeco-Persian conflict which had been his original 
theme was the latest episode in a succession of collisions of the same 
character; and this insight led him to the discovery that such encounters 
between contemporaries are apt to occur, not in isolation, but in series, 
and that these scries are not fortuitous, but are the product of psycho¬ 
logical ‘chain-reactions’ which a post-Modem Western student of 
History might compare with the physical ‘chain-reactions’ artificially 
produced by the inauspicious ingenuity of latter-day Western men 
of science. 

In the spiritual field of encounters between human beings which was 
the pre-Alexandrine Hellenic historian’s concern, Herodotus worked 
out a psychological formula to explain how one encounter could thus 
give rise to another. 1 In a situation in which two or more societies have 
come into contact with one another, one party takes an initiative which, 
from another party’s standpoint, is an act of aggression. This challenge 
confronts the assaulted party with a choice between acquiescing and re¬ 
acting, and, if he acquiesces, or again if he reacts merely to the extent 
required in order to rc-catablish the equilibrium which his neighbour’s 
wanton act of aggression has upset, this failure to hold his own or, in the 
alternative denouement, this successful act of self-defence will bring to 
a close not only this particular drama but, with it, the whole of the 
action which his adversary’s original act of aggression has started. A 
concatenation of encounters in which one tragedy generates another 
arises when the original victim of aggression is not content simply to 
redress a balance which the original aggressor has disturbed, but pro¬ 
ceeds to pass over into a counter-offensive in which he despoils his dis¬ 
comfited adversary of the ugly role of aggressor in order to clothe himself 
in his turn in this deadly shirt of Nessus. 

This demonic impulse to put oneself in the wrong is one of the fatal 
fruits of Original Sin in Human Nature; 

For Old Sin loves, when comes the hour again, 

To bring forth New. 1 

The ‘new sin’ of indulging in a retaliation disproportionate to the provo¬ 
cation for it is at least as grievous an act of hybris, and as infallible a 
means of incurring the penalty that hybris invariably brings in its train, 
as the ‘old sin’ of unprovoked aggression, by which it has been brought 
forth; and the penalty is the starting of a chain-reaction which, once set 
in motion, is inordinately difficult to arrest. 

i Herodotus, Book I. chaps. 1-4. , , . ...... 

a Aeschylus: Agamemnon, U. 763-6, Gilbert Murrays translation, quoted in IV. iv. 
256. 



456 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

We may profit by Herodotus’s discovery of concatenations of en¬ 
counters and accept the psychological formula in which he finds the ex¬ 
planation of this historical phenomenon' without having to accept, as 
integral parts of it, either his personal reconstruction of the particular 
series of encounters leading up to the Hclleno-Achacmenian War of 
499-449 b . c . 2 or his depiction of the chain-reaction of hybris in the naive 

« It will be noticed that the repetitive action which generates a concatenation of en¬ 
counters according to the Herodotcan formula is the same rhythm that in this Study 
(III. iii. 112-27) has been detected in the process of the internal growth of a civilization. 
In both processes the motive power is provided by the recurrent upsetting of an equili¬ 
brium which is repeatedly re-established only to be upset each time once again; and, 
if we translate the language of mechanics into terms more appropriate to a phenomenon 
which is not a physical movement of inanimate objects but is a psychological reaction 
of living creatures, we shall find ourselves describing each of our two sets of recurrent 
reactions in identical terms as a series of challenges which succeed one another because 
a successful response to one challenge gives rise to a fresh challenge which in its turn 
evokes a further challenge through having been faced and met successfully. There is thus 
a generic affinity between the encounter-rhythm and the growth-rhythm; but, when we 
pursue our comparative analysis of them in greater detail, we also become aware of 
differences that distinguish them from one another. In the encounter-rhythm the identity 
of both the challenger and the challenged party changes from round to round ex hypo- 
theti, since the upsetting of a re-established equilibrium, which produces a repetition of 
the movement, is here always due to the initiative of the party which has been the 
recipient and not the author of the challenge in the previous round, whereas in the 
growth-rhythm the role of recipient is played by the same party in round after round, 
and it is this continuity in the identity of the challcngec that gives the growth-rhythm 
its specific character of cumulativeness within the generic form of repetitiveness. The 
ethical complexion of the challenge that evokes each fresh round is also different in the 
two rhythms; for an initiative that in the growth-rhythm is an act of God or Satan (sec 
I. i. 271-99)»» in the encounter-rhythm an act of human hybris. 

1 We shall agree with Herodotus in seeing in the conflict between the Hellenes and the 
Achaemenidae in the fifth century B.c. the continuation of an older conflict between the 
Hellenes and the Phoenicians. In fact, we shall see these two conflicts ns successive 
phases in the course of a single encounter; and we shall therefore reject Herodotus’s 
insertion of two intervening links at this point in the chain. According to Herodotus 
the encounter between the Hellenes and the Phoenicians was followed by one between 
the Hellenes and the Colchians and another between the Hellenes and the Trojans 
before the Persians took up the cudgels in an imaginary feud between an Hellenic 
’Europe’ and an Oriental ‘Asia’. We may agree with Herodotus that the establishment 
of an Hellenic ascendancy over the backward peoples round the coasts of the Black 
Sea, which is commemorated in the Hellenic legend of the voyage of the Argonauts, 
must have been later in date than the beginning of the competition between Hellenes 
and Phoenicians, since the Hellenes did not secure their monopoly of maritime activity 
in the Black Sea until after they had defeated the Phoenician and Tyrrhenian attempts 
to compete with them for the command of the entrance to the Dardanelles (see pp. 420-1, 
above); but we cannot agree that the Phoenicians and the Colchians ever had any notion 
that they were fighting their respective battles with the Hellenes in a common Asiatic 
cause. And, as for Herodotus’s interpolation of ‘the Trojan War’ between the date of 
the Hellenes' penetration into the Black Sea, which docs not seem to have begun till 
after the opening of the seventh century b.c., and the date of the Lydian conquest of the 
Continental Asiatic Hellenes, which Herodotus treats as a prelude to the Persian assault 
on Hellas, this only shows how wildly wide of the mark were the endeavours of fifth- 
century Hellenic rationalists to transmute legend into history. In so far as the Hellenic 
legend of 'the Trojan War’ is a travesty* of any authentic historical event, it preserves 
the memory of a Vclkerwanderung in the Aegean area which had accompanied the dis¬ 
solution of a Minoan Society and preceded the rise of an Hellenic and a Syriac Society 
out of the wreckage of a shattered Minoan World. The competition between the Hellenic 
Society and the Phoenician representatives of the sister Syriac Civilization did not begin 
till at least four hundred years after the post-Minoan Volkerwanderung had come to a 
close. 

The Modem Western archaeologists’ feat of disinterring a Minoan Civilization of 
which the Hellenes had been almost oblivious gave a twentieth-century Western his¬ 
torian an overwhelming advantage over Herodotus when it was a auestion of trying to 
reconstruct the history of the late second millennium and the early last millennium B.c. 
But Herodotus’s errors in his reconstruction of links in a concatenation of encounters 
which he could reconstruct only by guesswork in the absence of records did not, of 
course, impugn his presentation of oecumenical history as a concatenation of encounters 


CONCATENATIONS OF ENCOUNTERS 457 
imager)' of the manners and customs of the Heroic Age 1 or his presenta¬ 
tion of this chronic conflict as a feud between ‘Asia’ and ‘Europe’ ; 2 and, 
if we do find ourselves convinced that the Herodotean analysis of the 
psychological causation of concatenations is valid, we can apply the 
formula on our own account to the encounter between the Achaemenian 
Empire and the Continental European Hellenes and see how far it may 
carry us from this point of departure in establishing associations between 
encounters which, in our foregoing survey, we have provisionally studied 
separately, as so many self-contained dramas, and not as inter-related 
episodes strung together on one continuous thread. 

In our own reconstruction of the concatenation in which the Helleno- 
Achaemenian War of 499-449 b . c . is one of the links, we may follow 
Herodotus to the extent of finding the starting-point of the action in a 
contest between the Phoenicians and the Hellenes for the command of 
the Mediterranean Basin; but, on our own previous interpretation of 
this encounter, we shall find the ‘beginning of evils’* in the Hellenes’ 
aggressive attempt, in and after the last quarter of the seventh century 
B.C., to add to their own lion’s share of the spoils of a new world by 
making provocative encroachments on the Phoenicians’ preserves in 
Andalusia, Western Sicily, and Tripolitania. The reaction which this act 
of Hellenic aggression evoked on the Phoenicians’ part resulted, as 
we have seen, after a hundred years of strife, in the restoration of 
equilibrium through the establishment of a Carthaginian and an Achac- 
mcnian Empire each commanding a collective power to keep the unco¬ 
ordinated aggression of the mutually independent Hellenic communities 
of the day within bounds on both the western and the eastern front of 
the Mediterranean arena. 4 The fatal act of counter-hybris which upset a 
re-established balance and thereby set the stage for the performance of 
a further tragedy was Darius’s decision to seek a solution for the problem 
of the Achaemenian Empire’s awkward north-west frontier by setting 

between representatives of diverse and conflicting’ civilizations. So far from that, these 
mistakes about matters of fact which for Herodotus were unknown and unknowable 
threw into relief the brilliance of an intuition which could divine one of the major 
rhythms of History from such imperfect evidence as the information at Herodotus's 
command. 

« It is not till he comes, in Book I, chapter 6, to record the subjugation of the Conti¬ 
nental Asiatic Hellenes by Croesus King of Lydia in the sixth century B.c. that Herodotus 
begins to depict encounters between Hellenes and non-Hellenes in the colours of so- 
called ’civilized’ life. Down to that point he deals in terms of the barbarian manners 
and customs of the Heroic Age. In the first four incidents in his concatenation the aggres¬ 
sive act of provocation takes the form of the abduction of a princess. The Phoenicians 
start the feud by abducting an Hellenic Io; the Hellenes retaliate by abducting a Phoeni¬ 
cian Europa; the Hellenes then cross the line between retaliation and provocation, to 
become aggressors in their turn, by abducting a Colchian Medea, and the Trojans 
retaliate by abducting an Hellenic Helen. After failing to obtain amends for this retalia¬ 
tory injury, the Hellenes then commit a second act of hybris, fraught with far graver 
consequences than their first, by resorting to war to avenge an abduction which they 
could have well afforded to ignore ’since it was obvious that these women would not 
have got themselves abducted if they had not so desired’. The act of military aggression 
which the Hellenes committed against the Asiatics in attacking and destroying Troy 
placed Hellas in a permanent state of war with Asia in the opinion ascribed by Herodotus 
to latter-day Persian champions of the Asiatic cause. This Herodotean account of pre- 
Croesan history is, of course, a prose version of the traditional Hellenic epic vein of 

P °» §ee Annex: “’Asia” and ‘‘Europe’’: Facts and Fantasies’, on pp. 708-29, below. 

J See Thucydides, Book II, chap. iz. 4 See pp. 421-9. “bovc. 

B M&S.nu Q 2 



458 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
out to compel the still independent part of the Hellenic World to submit 
to an Achaemenian domination. 1 The sensational defeat of this act of 
counter-hybris did not prevent it from making history; for its failure to 
attain its own objective was only the first instalment of the penalty that 
it drew down upon the heads of its perpetrators. The ultimate nemesis of 
Darius’s aberration was Philip of Macedon’s decision to turn the tables 
by conquering the Achaemenian Empire; and Alexander the Great, who 
was as sensationally successful as Xerxes had been sensationally un¬ 
successful in executing his father’s political testament, opened the first 
act in a new drama which forged the second link in this tragic concatena¬ 
tion. 

The destruction of the Achaemenian Empire in the fourth century 
B.c. by Alexander and of the Carthaginian Empire in the third century 
b.c. by Rome gave the Hellenic Society a dominion over its neighbours 
which far exceeded the most ambitious dreams of sixth-century Hellenic 
adventurers who had sailed as traders to Tartessus or served as mercen¬ 
aries at Pelusium or Babylon. In the post-Alexandrine Age of Hellenic 
history the Hellenes were masters not only of the Libyphoenician and 
Etruscan colonial domains of the Syriac and fossil Hittite societies in the 
Western Mediterranean but of these two societies’ homelands in the 
Levant and of the Egyptiac, Babylonic, and Indie worlds into the bar¬ 
gain. This portentous career of post-Alexandrine Hellenic aggression 
duly evoked a reaction on its Oriental victims’ part; and the eventual 
success of this reaction tardily restored a long-upset equilibrium when, 
a thousand years after Alexander’s passage of the Dardanelles, the un¬ 
doing of his work was at last completed by the Primitive Muslim Arabs’ 
feat of liberating, in lightning campaigns of an all but Alexandrine swift¬ 
ness, all ci-devant Syriac territories, from Syria to the Iberian Peninsula 
inclusive, that at the opening of the seventh century of the Christian Era 
had still been under the rule of the Roman Empire and its Visigothic 
successor-state. 

The re-establishment of a Syriac universal state in the shape of an 
Arab Caliphate which embraced under its single sovereignty the former 
domains of both the Carthaginian and the Achaemenian Empire 2 prom¬ 
ised in the second decade of the eighth century of the Christian Era to 
terminate a concatenation of encounters, at a stage at which not more than 
two links in the melancholy chain had yet been forged, by reproducing 
the stabilization that had been momentarily achieved in the last quarter 
of the sixth century b.c. through the rise of the Carthaginian and Achae- 
mcnian Powers. Indeed, the prospects of stability were decidedly more 
promising this time than they had been on the earlier occasion, since the 
Caliphate was stronger in its unity than the Achaemenian and Cartha¬ 
ginian empires had been in their mutual independence, while the two 
nascent Hellenistic civilizations of Western and Eastern Orthodox 
Christendom were less capable of challenging the alien oecumenical 
Power that had set bounds to their domains than the Hellenic Civiliza¬ 
tion had been in the vigour of its sixth-century adolescence. This second 
chance of bringing the momentum of strife to a halt by jettisoning the 
1 See pp. 430-5, above. * See I. i. 76-77. 



CONCATENATIONS OF ENCOUNTERS 459 
burden of karma 1 from which this momentum derived its impetus was, 
however, once again thrown away by wanton acts of counter-hybris. 

Like their Persian predecessors, the Arab avengers of a Syriac 
Society that had been the victim of Hellenic aggression were not content 
with their historically legitimate achievement of at last completing the 
eviction of an aggressor from alien territories on which he had trespassed 
by force of arms. They proceeded to repeat Darius’s error of passing 
over into a counter-offensive without having the excuse of finding 
themselves saddled with an untenable frontier that must be moved for¬ 
ward if it was not to be set back. The pressure of physical geography 
that impelled Darius and Xerxes to seek a natural frontier by embracing 
European as well as Asiatic Greece in their dominions did not constrain 
the Arabs to pass the natural frontier of the Taurus in order to lay siege 
to Constantinople in a.d. 673-7 and again in a.d. 717 or the natural 
frontier of the Pyrenees in order to invade Gaul in a.d. 732 or the natural 
frontier of the western basin of the Mediterranean Sea in order to 
conquer Crete and Sicily and overrun Apulia and seize bridgeheads 
along the Mediterranean coast of Western Christendom between the 
mouth of the Rhdne and the mouth of the Garigliano in the ninth 
century of the Christian Era. 2 These wanton acts of Muslim aggression 
against Eastern Orthodox and Western Christendom in the eighth and 
ninth centuries incurred their nemesis in the shape of East Roman and 
Frankish acts of retaliation in the tenth and eleventh centuries; and, 
though the East Roman counter-offensive broke off as a consequence 
of the breakdown of the Orthodox Christian Civilization, the Western 
Crusades went to lengths at which they forged a third link in an Hero- 
dotean concatenation of tragic encounters. 3 

This explosive expansion of a Medieval Western Christendom 
whose latent energies had been fired by the spark of Muslim aggression 
in the eighth and ninth centuries of the Christian Era evoked the reac¬ 
tion that was to be expected on the part of its victims. The cumulative 
efforts of Zengi, Nur-ad-Din, Saladin, and the Ayyubids’ Mamluk slave- 
successors evicted the Frankish intruders from Syria, and the 'Osmanlis 
completed the Greek Orthodox Christians’ unfinished work of evicting 
them from Romania as well. When the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II the 
Conqueror (imfterabat a.d. 1451-81) had accomplished his life-work, a 
thrice-upset equilibrium had been restored for the third time in this 
concatenation of historical tragedies, and a third chance of breaking the 
chain had presented itself; but, this time once again, the opportunity 
was lost through a wanton act of counter-hybris. 

While the Ottoman conqueror of Constantinople had been content to 
bring together within the political framework of an Ottoman universal 
state the disiecta membra of the main body of Orthodox Christendom, 

1 The Indie conception of Karma has been touched upon in V. v. 432-3. 

* See pp. 348-9, above. . . 

J One effect of this concatenation between the Syriac Society s successive encounters 
with the Hellenic Society in its pre-Alexandrine and in its post-Alcxandrine phase and 
with the two Hellenistic Christian societies was to produce ‘Sicilian Cycles’ that are the 
theme of one of Freeman’s most illuminating essays (Freeman, E. A.: Historical Essays, 
3rd scr., 2nd ed. (London 1892, Macmillan), pp. 434-42). 



460 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
his successors Selim the Grim and Suleyman the Magnificent recklessly 
overstepped the limits within which their wiser predecessor had found 
a fruitful field for constructive statesmanship. They annexed the domain 
of the Arabic Muslim Civilization from Syria to the Yaman and from 
'Iraq to Algeria inclusive; and they opened an attack upon the homeland 
of Western Christendom on both a Danubian and a Western Mediter¬ 
ranean front. This Ottoman Muslim aggression against Western Christ¬ 
endom at the opening of the modern chapter of its history had the same 
explosively stimulating effect as the Arab Muslim aggression against the 
same Western Christian Society at the opening of the medieval chapter 
of its history and the Achaemenian aggression against European Greece 
in the fifth century B.c. The Ottoman sieges of Vienna in a.d. 1529 and 
a.d. 1682-3 ended in the same sensational failure as the Arab sieges of 
Constantinople in a.d. 673-7 and A.D. 717 and as the Persian descents 
upon European Greece in 490 and 480 b.c. But the envelopment of 
Western Christendom by the horns of the Ottoman crescent nevertheless 
came near enough to success to do the Westerners the invaluable un¬ 
intended service of compelling them to cut losses which they had already 
incurred through the failure of the Crusades and to divert their energies 
from continuing to fight a lost battle for command of a Mediterranean 
cul-de-sac to embarking on a conquest of the Ocean which was to give 
them the dominion over the whole face of the planet. 

The consequent world-wide expansion of the Modern Western Civili¬ 
zation forged a fourth link in the Herodotean concatenation of en¬ 
counters ; but at the time of writing it was impossible to foretell whether 
this self-extending chain of tragedies was to be terminated as a tetralogy, 
with a modern satyr play for its finale, or whether it was to be prolonged 
beyond a fourth episode; for at the time of writing the fourth link in the 
chain was still in process of being heated in the furnace and hammered 
out on the anvil of the malign artificer Hephaestus. On the analogy of 
the three preceding dramas in the series it was no doubt to be expected 
that the unprecedentedly far-ranging and violent explosion of the 
Modern West, which had opened the current play, would evoke a re¬ 
action of comparable range and force; and mid-way through the twen¬ 
tieth century of the Christian Era a would-be reader of the signs of the 
times might be tempted to cast Russia for the part of organizer of the 
resistance movement against an arch-aggressor which had been played 
in previous episodes by the ’Osmanlis and Umayyads and Achaemenidae. 
A twentieth-century historian, on the other hand, would be less inclined 
to hazard such conjectures about the future than to be grateful that the 
accident of his own date of birth should have enabled him to observe, as 
matters of accomplished fact, three links in the Herodotean concatena¬ 
tion which had been added to the chain between Herodotus’s day and 
his own. 

Now that we have followed up the Herodotean concatenation, link by 
link, from the three-cornered contest between the Phoenicians, Etrus¬ 
cans, and pre-Alexandrinc Hellenes for the command of the Mediter¬ 
ranean Basin down to the high-powered impact of the Modern West on 
all other living societies on the face of the planet, this guiding thread 



CONCATENATIONS OF ENCOUNTERS 461 
will enable us to discern at least one other chain-reaction of the same 
kind which was originally set in motion by a backwash from one of the 
waves of barbarian invasion that flooded over the derelict domain of a 
moribund Sumeric Civilization in the eighteenth or the seventeenth 
century B.c. 

In other contexts we have already noticed that the Aryan Nomad bar¬ 
barian invaders who broke out of the Eurasian Steppe and over the 
Iranian Plateau into the Mesopotamian and Syrian provinces of ‘the 
Empire of the Four Quarters’ in the course of a post-Sumcric Volkcr- 
wanderung had Semitic-speaking contemporaries and counterparts in 
Palestine who engulfed the Delta province of ‘the Middle Empire’ of 
Egypt. 1 The deceptive facility with which the Hyksos established their 
dominion over the Egyptiac Society in this initial act of aggression gave 
no inkling of the demonic violence of the Egyptiac reaction with which 
they were to be expelled, a hundred years or so later, from the Nile 
Valley and to be pursued subsequently into Syria and Mesopotamia by 
Theban wardens of the Egyptiac World’s southern marches whose latent 
militarism had been aroused by the Asian barbarians’ impact. But the 
drama which had opened with the Hyksos’ unprovoked assault on the 
Egyptiac Society, and had found its denouement in this effective Egyptiac 
counter-stroke and in the consequent encounters between an Egyptiac 
Society that had thus been galvanized into new life and the Hittite and 
Babylonic successors of the Sumeric Society, might have been expected 
thereafter to peter out, without having sown fresh dragon-tooth seeds of 
karma, when ‘the New Empire’ of Egypt fell into decay and was overrun 
in its turn by barbarian invaders. At this juncture, however, History re¬ 
peated itself; for the Aramaic invaders of a dissolving Egyptiac New 
Empire’s domain in Syria swept on into Mesopotamia and surged up 
against Assyria, as the previous Hyksos invaders of a dissolving Egyptiac 
Middle Empire’s Asian domain had swept on into the Nile Valley 
and surged up against the Thebaid; and this recurrence of an untoward 
constellation of historical circumstances generated a concatenation of 
encounters by begetting a second tragedy in which the motif of the 
preceding drama reproduced itself on a larger scale and with greater 
violence. 

The backwash from a barbarian flood that had been engulfing the 
domain of a neighbouring society infuriated the Assyrian wardens of the 
Babylonic World’s northern marches as it had infuriated the Theban 
wardens of the southern marches of the Egyptiac World ; z and on this 
occasion, as on that, the sins of barbarian aggressors who had aroused so 
formidable a latent force were not visited solely on the heads of these 
aggressors’ children; for the Assyrian militarists who had been goaded into 
counter-aggression by a provocative challenge from outlying Aramaean 
members of a nascent Syriac Society fell upon all their neighbours in¬ 
discriminately, without sparing cither the unoffending members of the 
Syriac Society west of the Euphrates or the surviving fragments of 
an already shattered Hittite Society astride the Taurus or even their 

1 See I. i. 105; p. 448, above, and the Note on Chronology in vol. x, pp. 197-208. 

a See II. ii. 133-5. ">d PP- 439 “ 4 °. above. 



462 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
own kinsmen in the interior of a Babylonic World of which the Assyrian 
marchmen themselves were members and which it was their historic 
mission not to attack but to defend. 

It will be seen that this ‘Hyksos-Aramaean’ or ‘Theban-Assyrian’ 
concatenation of two encounters overlapped in the Time-dimension 
with the Herodotean concatenation whose fourth link was still in 
process of being forged in the twentieth century of the Christian Era; 
and, though the two chains cannot be reduced to a single series, they 
also cannot be wholly disentangled from one another. 

In the first of the four successive tragedies in the Herodotean tetralogy 
the outcome of a drama that had the Western Mediterranean Basin for 
its theatre was influenced, as we have noticed, 1 by the course of a con¬ 
temporary drama, performed in the South-West Asian ‘Fertile Crescent’, 
which was the second of the two tragedies in the Theban-Assyrian series. 
The furor Assyrianis first undesignedly handicapped the Phoenicians 
and Tyrrhenians in their maritime competition with the Hellenes by 
harrying their continental homelands in the Levant, and then likewise 
undesignedly helped them to retrieve their position in the Mediter¬ 
ranean vis-a-vis the Hellenes by preparing the ground in South-West 
Asia and Egypt for the rapid establishment of an Achaemenian Empire 
that was to give the Syrophoenicians a powerful backing. The Assyrians 
had made the Achaemenian Empire’s fortune, before the Achaemcnidae 
had been heard of, by provoking the consolidation of a Median successor- 
state whose Assyrian spoils Cyrus the Achacmcnid took over, and they 
had also facilitated the Achaemenian empire-builders’ subsequent task 
by breaking, for their benefit, the spirit of the peoples of South-West 
Asia and Egypt. 

Thereafter, this Assyro-Persian second link in a Theban-Assyrian 
chain became inseparably intertwined with the Pcrso-Macedonian 
second link in the Herodotean chain; for the encounters with the Baby- 
Ionic Civilization that had been forced upon its Hittite, Syriac, and 
Egyptiac neighbours by successive explosions of Assyrian militarism in 
the ninth, eighth, and seventh centuries b.c. had brought the Assyrians’ 
victims into intimate relations with one another as well as with the 
Babylonic World; and this fusion of divers cultures that had been a by¬ 
product of the furor Assyriacus was extended and intensified when the 
impact of Hellenic militarism in and after the generation of Alexander 
the Great brought the Indie and the Sinic Society into contact both 
with Hellenism and with the four societies that had already been broken 
up by an Assyrian hammer and thrown together into an Achaemenian 
melting-pot. In the post-Alexandrine Age of Hellenic and Oriental 
history the progressive penetration of the Babylonic, Hittite, and 
Egyptiac societies by the Syriac culture, which had been taking place 
first under Assyrian assault and battery and latterly under an Achae¬ 
menian aegis, was overtaken and challenged by the ubiquitous radiation 
of the Hellenic culture in the train of Macedonian and Roman conquista- 
dores. For a thousand years, running from Alexander’s passage of the 
Dardanelles to the final liquidation of an Alexander’s and a Scipio’s 
1 On pp. 42: and 424-6. above. 


CONCATENATIONS OF ENCOUNTERS 463 
work by the Primitive Muslim Arabs, the Syriac and Hellenic Civiliza¬ 
tions were competing for the conversion of Babylonic, Hittite, and 
Egyptiac souls; 1 and this competition, which was one of the major in¬ 
cidents in both Syriac and Hellenic history, is a common episode in 
which our two concatenations of encounters are inseparably implicated 
with one another. 

If Herodotus had happened to be born into the post-Alexandrine in¬ 
stead of the pre-Alexandrinc Age of Hellenic history, his unrivalled 

E tius for finding a clue to the tangled skein which is every oecumenical 
torian’s raw material would assuredly have led him to take this post- 
Alexandrinc Kulturkampf, in preference to a pre-Alexandrine military 
conflict between the Achaemenian Empire and the city-states of Euro¬ 
pean Greece, as the point of departure for his own reconstruction of a 
history of Mankind which presented itself to his eyes as a concatenation 
of encounters between the divers civilizations in which the Spirit of 
Man had expressed itself. And indeed this brilliant Hellenic discoverer 
of the historical phenomenon of concatenations could have found no 
better vantage-point if the chance that so capriciously allots the time 
and place of each individual's birth had condemned Herodotus to be 
born into a twentieth-century Western World; for, in the perspective of 
an observer posted in that society in that age, the story of the post- 
Alcxandrinc competition between the Syriac culture and Hellenism for 
the conversion of souls still manifested itself to be the stem from which 
all living branches of human history had ramified. 

A Hellenism which in the fourth century b.c. had launched out on a 
new career of expansion had not passed away till it had made an impact 
on every other living civilization in the Old World; one response to the 
challenge of these impacts had been the epiphany of the higher religions; 
these higher religions had served as chrysalises from which all the old- 
world civilizations of the third generation had emerged; and one of these 
tertiary civilizations, in the modern chapter of its history, had brought 
all other living civilizations into contact with one another by spreading 
its own tentacles all round the globe. In fact, the histories of all the 
higher religions and all the civilizations except the Mayan and the 
Sumcric and the Indus Culture and the Shang Culture could have been 
housed by an imaginary twentieth-century Herodotus in the authentic 
Herodotus's capacious house of many mansions; and, in taking a con¬ 
catenation of encounters as the ground plan for his masterpiece of 
literary architecture, Herodotus was showing a penetrating insight into 
the structure of an oecumenical historian’s subject-matter; for these 
encounters between societies that are one another’s contemporaries arc 
evidently extremely prehensile; they readily interlock; and the two 
intertwined concatenations that we have traced out have proved to em¬ 
brace, between them, the greater part of post-primitive human history 
down, not merely to the fifth century b.c., but to the twentieth century 
of the Christian Era. 


Sec pp. 442-6, above. 



464 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 


(II) ROLES, REACTIONS, AND DENOUEMENTS 

( a) AGENTS AND REAGENTS 

Our survey of encounters between civilizations that are one another’s 
contemporaries, and of the concatenations in which these encounters are 
apt to interlock, has already brought to light a diversity in the roles 
played by the actors in these social dramas. In each play, and indeed in 
each act of any one of them, there is a part}' that precipitates the en¬ 
counter by taking the initiative and there is another party that reacts to 
this assault by endeavouring to shake off the ascendancy which the 
seizure of the initiative has placed in his assailant’s hands. 

It is no doubt conceivable that the original agent’s initiative may be so 
disconcerting, or his intrinsic strength, vigour, and efficiency so pre¬ 
dominant, that the assaulted party may be subjugated or even annihilated 
without ever having succeeded in offering any resistance whatsoever. 
Within the five or six thousand years during which the species of human 
society known as civilizations had been in existence down to the time of 
writing, a number of primitive societies had suffered the fate of annihila¬ 
tion at the hands of representatives of this younger and more potent 
variety of their kind ; 1 but examples of this decisively simple outcome of 
an encounter between contemporaries would have been hard to find in 
instances in which both the parties were civilizations. Societies of this 
younger type were insured against a doom to which primitive societies 
were prone to succumb by the relatively considerable size of their areas 
and populations , 2 in which civilizations even of the lowest physical 
calibre far outstripped primitive societies of the largest order of physical 
magnitude . 1 The normal fate of the bodies social of civilizations that had 
been prostrated by the impact of aggressive contemporaries had been, 
not extermination, but subjugation; and the historical evidence showed 

1 Sec I. i. 148-9. _ * See ibid. 

3 In the post-Columbian history of the New World the comparative density of the 
agricultural population in the domains of the Central American and Andean societies 
was no doubt one of the reasons why these ‘Indians’ survived the fearful experience of 
the Spanish conquest and domination, when the sparse population of hunters in North 
America was supplanted by the agricultural colonists who streamed across the Atlantic 
to create the United States. It is noteworthy that the north-western outposts of a sub¬ 
jugated Centra! American Society in New Mexico managed to survive the conquest of 
their country by the United States no less successfully than their kinsmen across the 
border managed to live on under the regimes of the Viceroyalty of New Spain and its 
successor-state the Republic of Mexico. Even the culturally more backward agricultural 
peoples of Southern Appalachia survived the ordeal of being deported from their homes 
in the south-eastern section of the United States and being deposited in reservations 
beyond the Mississippi which were eventually engulfed in the State of Oklahoma (see 
p. 36, n. I, above). 

At the same time, the survival of the scions of the Andean and Central American 
civilizations and the disappearance of the primitive societies of North America cannot 
be accounted for wholly by the differences between these peoples of the New World, 
in the mntter of their comparative levels of culture and comparative densities of popula¬ 
tion, at the time of their subjugation by their conquerors from the other side of the 
Atlantic. We have already noticed in another context (in II. i. 211-27) that there was 
an historic difference between the respective attitudes of the Catholic and the Protestant 
conquerors of the ‘Indians’ towards their victims. The victims of the Protestant con¬ 
querors had the misfortune to be reckoned as ‘Natives’ by a New Israel whose pre¬ 
occupation with the historical books of the Old Testament had infected them with a 
race-feeling that remained foreign to the outlook of the Castilian successors of the Cid 
and Sortonus—cruel and rapacious though these conquistadorei were. 


ROLES, REACTIONS, AND DENOUEMENTS 465 
that it would be rash to assume, in any instance in which both parties 
were still alive, that the subjugation of one of them by the other was the 
end of the story, however desperate the subjugated party’s initial dis¬ 
comfiture and discouragement. 

A striking example of a subjugation that had every appearance of being 
definitive was the prostration of the Mexic and Andean societies after 
the military overthrow of the Aztec and Inca Powers by the Castilian 
pioneers of one of the civilizations of the Old World. 1 Yet the judge¬ 
ment; hazarded in an earlier passage of this Study, 1 that these two sub¬ 
jugated civilizations of the New World might be considered to have been 
completely incorporated into the Western Christian body social by the 
time of writing, might have to be suspended in the light of the surpris¬ 
ingly different denouement that had eventually declared itself in certain 
comparable cases. 

An Arabic Muslim Civilization which had been swallowed up by an 
Iranic Muslim Civilization in the sixteenth century of the Christian Era 
had unexpectedly re-emerged in the nineteenth century, after a three- 
hundred-years-long living death in the belly of the whale, 3 to reassert 
itself by taking an individual path of its own towards the goal of Westerni¬ 
zation. The Oriental societies that had lain inert for more than a hundred 
years, after their Achaemenian house of many mansions had suddenly 
been brought tumbling about their ears by the blast of an apparently 
superhuman Alexander’s thunderbolt, had lived on to give a counter¬ 
shock to their Hellenic conquerors by proving after all to have been, not 
permanently paralysed, but merely temporarily stunned; and this trick, 
that was played on the Ptolemies by their Egyptiac subjects and on the 
Seleucidae by the Jews at and after the turn of the third and second 
centuries B.C., was likewise played on British rulers of India in the 
twentieth century of the Christian Era by Indian subjects whose nine¬ 
teenth-century acquiescence in a British RSj was proved by their twen¬ 
tieth-century reaction against the same British regime to have been no 
more than a temporary psychological effect of eighteenth-century 
political and social tribulations. On the evidence of these three other 
cases it would have been more prudent in the Central American case to 
refrain from pre-judging the question whether the Mexican Revolution 
of a.d. 1910 would prove in the event to have inaugurated the last stage 
in the Westernization of a subjugated Central American Civilization or 
the first stage in a reaction of the submerged society which—to judge by 
the history' of the Oriental reactions to the impact of a post-Alexandrine 
Hellenism—might be none the less vigorous and effective in the long 
run for having been so long delayed owing to the severity of the shock 
that had been administered four hundred years before by an alien 
aggressor’s sudden stunning blow. 

The truth would appear to be that Life, so long as even a spark of it 
survives, is irreconcilable with permanent passivity; and on this showing 
we may expect that there will always be more than one act in the drama 
of any encounter between societies in which both parties are civilizations, 

« See IV. iv. 79-81 end V. v. 90-93. 

* In IV. iv. 81. 


J See IV. iv. 113-14- 



466 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

and in which the party that suffers assault will therefore ex hypothesi 
have been proof against the conclusive fate of annihilation. Even when 
the assaulted party’s life has been reduced by the severity of its experi¬ 
ence to a state of ‘living death’, the original act of aggression by which 
the encounter has been precipitated will stimulate the victim to react in 
some way sooner or later. In terms that have become familiar in this 
Study, an encounter between civilizations that are one another’s con¬ 
temporaries may be described as being one terrestrial manifestation of 
the cosmic action of Challenge-and-Response ; 1 and the particular res¬ 
ponse which this particular challenge evokes will bring into play the 
dramatic motif of peripeteia or 'the reversal of roles , 2 since the reaction, 
however feeble it may be, will, as far as it goes, be an endeavour on the 
victim’s part to wrest the initiative out of the assailant’s hands. 

These terms ‘assailant’ and ‘victim’ are not very happily chosen; for, 
while they have the practical merit of conveying the diversity in the 
character of the roles in the drama of an encounter between contempor¬ 
aries, they import a connotation of violence, wickedness, and suffering 
which are not inherent in this dramatic situation, however few of the 
encounters known to History might in fact have been entirely gentle, 
innocent, and innocuous. However that may be, the ethically colourless 
terms ‘agent’ and ‘reagent’ seem preferable to the prejudicial terms 
‘assailant’ and ‘victim’ for designating two characters in our drama for 
which we need to find distinctive names in order to bring out the dis¬ 
tinction between the parts which these characters play. Now that we 
have identified the roles and have labelled the characters, we can go on 
to survey the principal alternative possible types of reaction and the 
principal alternative possible denouements in encounters of this kind. 

( b ) ALTERNATIVE POSSIBLE REACTIONS 

In surveying the alternative types of reaction it may be convenient to 
begin with those that are retorts in kind to the action by which they 
have been evoked, and to pass the rest in review in an ascending order 
of the degree of their difference in character from the challenges to 
which they are responses. 

The most conspicuous form of a retort in kind is a reply to force by 
force which is one of the commonest of the motifs that have presented 
themselves in our survey of historic encounters . 3 

For example, the Hindu and Orthodox Christian victims of aggressive 
Iranic Muslim militarism retorted by turning militant themselves and 
showing their teeth to their oppressors. This was the Sikhs’ and the 
MarSthSs’ retort to the Mughals and the hajduks’ and the klcphts’ 
retort 4 to the 'Osmanlis. Even a moribund Syriac World and its nascent 
Arabic successor summoned up the military spirit to evict the Crusaders 
from all except their Andalusian and Sicilian conquests at the expense of 
Dar-al-Islam; and the apparently unwarlike Greek Orthodox Christians 
were stung by the outrage of the Fourth Crusade into embarking on the 

* See II. i. 271-99- . 2 See IV. iv. 245-61- 

* On pp. 106-453, possim, above, where some account will be found of all the 

episodes cited below in the present chapter. * Sec V. v. 296-302. 


ROLES, REACTIONS, AND DENOUEMENTS 467 
perilous adventure of a resistance movement which succeeded in recap¬ 
turing Constantinople from the Frankish usurpers within fifty-seven 
years of the date of their seizure of the Imperial City, and in evicting 
them from their last foothold in the Morea before the Moreot Greeks 
forfeited to the 'Osmanlis the liberty that they had recovered from the 
Franks by the strength of their own right arms. 

In an encounter between the Hellenes and their Oriental contempor¬ 
aries, the Arsacidac, the Sasanidae, and the Primitive Muslim Arabs in 
turn successfully ventured to try conclusions with a Macedonian military 
machine that had won a reputation for invincibility by overthrowing the 
Achaemenian Empire and with a Roman military machine that had 
captured this reputation from the Macedonians by overthrowing Mace- 
don itself. The Modern Western Powers retorted effectively to their long- 
victorious Ottoman assailants’ superiority in military technique by 
mastering the tricks of their adversaries’ trade; and Russian autocrats 
twice over made the same retort to technologically superior Modern 
Western militarists. A Muscovy that had all but succumbed to Polish 
aggression in the seventeenth century succeeded in foiling Swedish 
aggression in the eighteenth century and French aggression in the nine¬ 
teenth century thanks to Peter the Great’s effective adoption of the 
Modern Western military technique of the day; and a post-Petrine 
Russia that had collapsed in the World War of a.d. 1914-18 under the 
impact of a German war-machine driven by the power of twentieth- 
century Western Industrialism succeeded in triumphantly repelling a 
second and more formidable German attack in the World War of a.d. 

1939-45 thanks to Stalin’s effective industrialization of the Soviet Union 
during an inter-war breathing-space. 

Between the date of the military collapse of Germany in a.d. 1945 and 
the moment in the autumn of a.d. 1949 when these lines were written, 
Russia was believed by Western observers to have made a third retort in 
kind to a third challenge from the West in the same field of technological 
warfare by mastering the ‘know-how’ of manufacturing an atomic bomb 
which had been discovered in the United States in time for use in a.d. 
1945 in dealing a ‘knock-out blow’ to Japan. The Japanese had com¬ 
mitted the folly of courting destruction by wantonly attacking the 
United States in a.d. 1941 because they had grossly overestimated their 
own relative military strength; this inept miscalculation was the nemesis 
of deceptively facile Japanese victories over technologically backward 
Russian and Chinese opponents in the course of the preceding fifty years; 
and these victories had been rewards for the shrewdness of Japanese 
Elder Statesmen when they had met a challenge of Western military 
superiority in the third quarter of the nineteenth century by a response 
which had shot ahead of Peter the Great’s and had anticipated Stalin’s. 

Such illustrations of retorts in kind on the military plane are the tradi¬ 
tional classic examples of this rather unimaginative type of response to 
the challenge of an encounter; but on closer examination some of these 
cases prove to be not quite the strict observances of the lex talionis that 
at first sight they might seem to be. 

The Modern Western Powers, for example, did not simply take the 



468 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
Ottoman art of war as they found it; they proceeded to make notable 
improvements on it at the very time when the ’Osmanlis themselves 
were losing their grip on an instrument that had been of their own in¬ 
vention. 1 The 'Osmanlis had achieved their previous victories over the 
Westerners and the Mamluks, and the Mamluks their own previous 
victories over the Westerners and the Mongols, not just by pitting pug¬ 
nacity against pugnacity, but by bringing a creative faculty into action 
against opponents who had lapsed into resting on their oars. The Mam¬ 
luks had worsted the Western cataphracts and the Eurasian horse- 
archers by creating a cavalry that was both heavy-armed and disciplined, 2 
and the 'Osmanlis had worsted the Mamluks by out-trumping a dis¬ 
ciplined cavalry with the new weapon of a disciplined infantry. 3 The 
horse-archer and the cataphract were thus eventually driven off the field 
by Mamluk and Ottoman war-machines which triumphed over them in 
virtue of being not simply retorts in kind but in some sense new devices 
of superior efficacy; and the two thenceforth obsolete types of cavalry 
that had held the field for so many centuries had originally won their 
entry into it as likewise new’ and likewise superior inventions in virtue of 
which the Arsacidac had managed to defeat a disciplined infantry of the 
Macedonian and Roman schools. 4 

A Communist Russia, too, was not content simply to master the 
military technique of a Germany and a United States who were her 
successive Western enemies. While with one hand she was retorting in 
kind to Germany by harnessing Industrialism to War and retorting in 
kind to the United States by equipping herself with atomic weapons, 
her other hand was busy all the time with the creation of a new form of 
warfare in which the old-fashioned method of fighting by physical force 
of arms was to be replaced by a spiritual combat in which the battlefield 
would be the Psyche, the troops would be emotions and ideas, and the 
master weapon would be a propaganda inspired by an ‘ideology’ whose 
captivating power might prove more potent for the achievement of war- 
aims than even the explosive power of a bomb charged with devastat- 
ingly fissile matter. 

In inventing ‘the cold war’ the Russians might prove to have succeeded 
in wresting at last out of Western hands an initiative which the West had 
won and maintained in a perennial competition with Russia on the 
military plane by first adopting an Ottoman military technique and then 
improving this borrowed art out of all recognition by enlisting in its 
service an Industrial Revolution and a mastery of atomic energy. It was 
true that ‘the cold war’ was not created by the Russians ex nihilo , but, 
like every other human invention, was partly inspired by one of Man¬ 
kind’s previous achievements. The instrument of propaganda, which 
Communism brought into action as a new weapon in the arena of mun¬ 
dane power politics, had first been fashioned by the missionaries of the 
higher religions for the more ctherial purpose of converting souls. In 
any deconsecrated society—post-Christian, post-Muslim, or post-Ma- 
hayanian—this once religious art was at Homo Obcaecatus 's disposal for 


1 See III. iii. 46-47. 


2 Sec IV. iv. 447-50. 



ROLES, REACTIONS, AND DENOUEMENTS 469 

baser uses; and Homo Obcaecatus Occidentals had actually anticipated 
Homo Obcaecatus Russicus in thus bringing propaganda down to earth. 
A Modern Western society of shopkeepers had turned the religious art 
of propaganda to account for the commercial advertisement of a mech¬ 
anized industry’s wares; but it had been left by the Modern Westerners 
to their Russian contemporaries to hit upon the new idea of applying the 
missionary’s methods of influencing his public to the mischievous busi¬ 
ness of politics instead of to the sordid business of economics; and, when 
thus suddenly faced with a systematically propagated Communist ‘ideo¬ 
logy’, the West found itself momentarily at a loss for a reply. 

While the Communist propaganda could hardly improve on the 
practice of contemporary Western commercial advertising in the lavish¬ 
ness of its outlay or in the painstakingness of its ‘market research’, it did 
show itself capable of reawakening a long dormant enthusiasm in spirit¬ 
ually starved post-Christian Western souls that were so hungry for the 
bread without which Man shall not live that they recklessly swallowed 
the word which Communism gave them, without pausing to ask whether 
this was God’s* word or Antichrist’s. The Marxian Gospel was able to 
evoke this enthusiastic response because it speciously professed to offer 
to Man a matchless opportunity for satisfying a desire which was the 
deepest and noblest motive in Human Nature. Man is spiritually frus¬ 
trated if he cannot invest his petty transient personal life with abiding 
spiritual significance by devoting it to some cause that manifestly trans¬ 
cends it in spiritual value; and Communism proffered to Man an objec¬ 
tive that might seem worthier than any that had been visible on his 
mental horizon since the latter-day eclipse of Christianity. Communism 
called upon post-Christian Man to cure himself of a childish nostalgia for 
a justly discredited otherworldly utopia by transferring his allegiance 
from a non-existent God to a very present Human Race to whose service 
he could devote all his adult powers by working for the attainment of an 
Earthly Paradise. In an oecumenical struggle between a Communist 
Russia and a secularized Modem Western Society for the allegiance of 
the rest of Mankind the apologists for a dampingly prosaic secular 
Modern Western way of life might find themselves hard put to it to ‘sell’ 
their unconvincing apotheosis of the self-interested individual human 
being in competition with this captivating Communist cult of the 
colossal idol of Collective Humanity. 

It is evident that, in inventing a post-Christian ‘ideological’ warfare 
as a reply to a post-Christian warfare waged by physical force, a Com¬ 
munist Russia had crossed the indeterminate borderline between a retort 
in kind and a retort which was telling in virtue of its difference in 
character from the challenge to which it was a response. 'The cold war’ 
was a response on the plane of propaganda to a challenge on the plane of 
physical armaments, and this was not the first response on a non-military 
plane that the old-fashioned military challenge had ever evoked. 

In an encounter between a Syriac and a pre-Alexandrine Hellenic 
Society we have already seen the Phoenicians make an effective non¬ 
military retort to the military aggression of an expanding Hellenic World 

« Matt. iv. 4; Luke iv. 4. 



47 © ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
that had enjoyed the two decisive military advantages of holding the 
interior lines and commanding a superiority in numbers. The hard- 
pressed Phoenicians had saved themselves from military disaster by re¬ 
sorting to the non-military counter-measure of political combination on 
a grand scale, and we have observed that this Phoenician manoeuvre of 
changing the ground of competition proved effective because the Hel¬ 
lenes were unable or unwilling to emulate the Phoenicians’ statesman¬ 
like moves on the new ground on to which they had been drawn by the 
Phoenicians’ counter-initiative. While the sixth-century Libyphocnician 
city-states purchased security by acquiescing in the hegemony of Carth¬ 
age, and the sixth-century Syrophocnician city-states by acquiescing in 
the hegemony of the Achacmenidae, the contemporary Hellenic city- 
states forfeited their previous military ascendancy over their Phoenician 
rivals by failing to bring themselves, for their part, to pay the inexorable 
price of a political union that was now the key to strength on the new 
terms of competition which the Phoenicians’ initiative had set. 

A similarly effective political response to a military challenge was 
made by Russian Orthodox Christendom after the Tatars’ facile sub¬ 
jugation of a House of Rurik which had fallen a prey to these Eurasian 
Nomad aggressors largely because it had been divided against itself." 
How were the subjugated Russians ever to shake off the yoke of a steppe- 
empire which commanded all the Nomad military man-power of the 
great open spaces between Russia and Khwarizm ? Their only hope of 
liberation lay in achieving a concentration of Russian political power 
that would be a match for the military power of Juji’s enormous province 
of Chingis Khan’s universal state; and this retort to a challenge on one 
plane by a response on another was duly accomplished by a line of 
Muscovite empire-builders who were so grimly intent on their patriotic 
purpose that they did not shrink from achieving it at the all but pro¬ 
hibitive price of bringing the Medusa head of a defunct Byzantine auto¬ 
cracy out of a chamber of horrors in the museum of Russia’s Orthodox 
Christian cultural heritage. 

Such retorts on the political plane to assaults on the military plane 
may be supplemented by ‘geopolitical’ manoeuvres. After the Phoe¬ 
nician rivals of the pre-Alexandrine Hellenes had managed to bring their 
adversaries’ aggression to a halt by concentrating their own political 
forces under the hegemony of two imperial Powers, these Carthaginian 
and Achaemenian empires attempted to crush the foiled Hellenic aggres¬ 
sors by simultaneous enveloping movements. A Russia which had re¬ 
torted to the aggression of the Tatars by acquiescing in the autocracy of 
a Muscovite Third Rome proceeded to turn the northern flank of a 
Eurasian Nomad World—and of an Islamic Society which by that time 
had incorporated into itself the western half of Chingis Khan’s gigantic 
ranch—by carrying her eastern frontier forward from the River Moskva 
to the Pacific Ocean; and a simultaneous envelopment of D 3 r-al-Islam 
on the south was the contemporary Western World’s retort to an Otto- 

* Between a . d . 1055 and a . d . 1228 there had been eighty fratricidal war* in Russia 
between rival Rurikid princes (Vernadsky, G.: Kievan Ruisia (New Haven 1948, Yale 
University Press), p. 3x6). 



ROLES, REACTIONS, AND DENOUEMENTS 471 
man frontal attack on Western Christendom in the basins of the Danube 
and the Mediterranean. 

Both these anti-lslamic encircling movements were executed in a 
novel element in which the encircled adversary found himself at a dis¬ 
advantage. The Cossacks foiled the Nomads by learning how to thread 
their way through woods, which these steppe-rangers dared not enter, 
along waterways that the Nomads had learnt to cross but not to navigate . 1 
The Portuguese out-trumped 'Osmanlis who in Mediterranean waters, 
as well as on continental ground, had established a military ascendancy 
over their Western Christian adversaries. The Portuguese wrested from 
Nature the secret of how to navigate an Ocean that had hitherto success¬ 
fully defied Man's efforts to master it ; 2 and, in thus shifting the ground 
of the competition between the Islamic World and the West from the 
field of military armaments and tactics on land and on land-locked seas 
t° the field of oceanic ship-building 1 and seamanship, they snatched the 
initiative out of Ottoman hands. An Ottoman navy that knew how to 
meet its Western opponents on equal terms in the Mediterranean found 
itself swept off the Indian Ocean by ocean-faring Westerners whose 
mastery of their own clement decisively tipped the scales against the 
'Osmanlis' geopolitical advantage of here holding the interior lines . 4 

« The exception that hud proved the rule of the Eurasian Nomads’ unenterprising 
indifference to the possibility of utilizing rivers as means of communication had been 
the use made of the waterways of the Indus and its tributaries in the second and the last 
century b.c. by Saka conquerors of a Bactrian Greek Empire who had perhaps first 
taken to the water in their previous haunts along the banks of the Middle Oxus and the 
Lower Jaxarfes (t» V. v. 603). 

* The ultimate failure of the Scandinavians to bring the New World into continuous 
communication with the Old World by a North Atlantic route which they had come 
within an ace of opening up has been noticed in II. ii. 438-43. 

J The swiftness of the evolution of an ocean-worthy type of ship on the Atlantic sea¬ 
board of Western Christendom in the fifteenth century of the Christian Era is discussed 
in XI. ix. 364-8. 

4 The Portuguese achievement of learning how to navigate the Ocean was, of course, 
not merely a decisive event in an encounter between the West and the Islamic World; 
it was an epoch-making event in human history, because it made Man master of n 
medium of communication that was sufficiently conductive, and near enough to being 
ubiquitous, to knit the entire habitable surface of the planet together into a home for an 
oecumenical society embracing the whole of Mankind. At the time of writing in the first 
century of a post-Modem Age of Western history, the social unification of the World 
which had been brought about by the Portuguese invention of an ocean-faring sailing- 
ship had found new instruments in the aeroplane and the broadcasting station; but, 
however high the latter-day conquests of the ether and the air might rank in the honours’ 
list of scientific inventions, it was manifest that they could not compare with the con- 

C st of the Ocean in point of social importance. As means to the social end of knitting 
whole of Mankind into a single society, aerial navigation and wireless communica¬ 
tion merely served to draw closer a world-encompassing net which Man’s conquest of 
the Ocean had long since flung round the globe. The decisive step in the unification of 
the World had been the invention of the type of ocean-going sailing-vessel that came to 
be known as 'the ship’ par txcellentr, and Henry the Navigator and his companions had 
not only required no successors; they had also had no predecessors; for the enduring 
unification of the whole surface of the globe, which was the fruit of their work, was a 
social achievement whose consequences in its own sphere differed in a degree that 
virtually amounted to a difference in kind from the effects of the fitful inter-communica¬ 
tion between the civilizations of the Old World that had resulted in earlier ages from the 
achievements of Minoan pioneers in the navigation of inland seas and of Nomad 
pioneers in the taming of horses. A discussion of the historical significance of the replace¬ 
ment of Babur’s steppe-ranging horse by da Gama’s ocean-faring ship as the sovereign 
instrument of human intercourse, at and after the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth 
centuries of the Christian Era, will be found in Toynbee, A. J.: Civilization on Trial 
(London 1948, Cumbcrlegc), pp. 62-96: 'The Unification of the World and the Change 
in Historical Perspective’. 



472 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

The Modem Western Christian mariners who thus foiled the Ottoman 
militarists by taking to the Ocean did not entirely break away from the 
modus operandi of the adversaries to whom they were making their novel 
retort; for, though commerce was the principal quest of the new-fangled 
Portuguese ocean-faring ships, and though the Manchester School of nine¬ 
teenth-century English political philosophy may not have been altoget her 
mistaken in idealizing commerce as the beneficently pacific world-unify¬ 
ing activity of Modern Western Man , 1 the progeny of the Crusaders had 
not undergone so miraculous a change of heart as to have become proof 
against the temptation of running their predatory ancestral pursuits of 
piracy and empire-building in double harness with the respectably law¬ 
ful occasions of their ocean voyages. A less dubious example of a pacific 
encircling movement in reply to a military frontal attack is the encircle¬ 
ment of the Babylonic World by the Syriac Society in the Achaemenian 
Age as a result of a cultural conversion of Iranian barbarians who had 
become the rulers of a universal state. 

The missionaries of the Syriac culture who had thus defeated their 
Babylonic conquerors in a competition for the captivation of Iranian 
souls had not made the long overland trek from ‘the Land beyond the 
River' to the lands beyond the Zagros as military or even as merchant 
adventurers; they were ‘displaced persons’ who had been deported by 
Assyrian and Babylonian war-lords with the object of making it once for 
all impossible for them to re-establish their beloved Israel’s or Judah's 
shattered military and political power; and their conquerors’ calculation 
had proved correct as far as it had gone; for neither the Assyrian nor the 
Neo-Babylonian imperial regime had ever been challenged thereafter by 
any armed uprising of these deportees. The reaction by which the Baby¬ 
lonic militarists’ Syriac victims eventually wrested the initiative out of 
their oppressors’ hands had been quite beyond the oppressors’ purview 
because it was on a wholly non-military plane. The oppressors had so 
utterly failed to reckon with the possibility of any retort on the cultural 
plane from victims whom they were effectively rendering militarily and 
politically impotent that with their own hands they had planted them in 
a cultural mission-field which these exiles would never have visited if 
they had not been posted there by force against their will. 

In thus exerting itself to impress its cultural influence on the Gentiles 
among whom it had been scattered abroad, a Syriac diaspork in 'the 
cities of the Mcdcs ’ 1 and in Babylonia was being moved by a concern to 
preserve a communal identity that the oppressor had intended to destroy 
by uprooting these deportees from their national home. In the histories 
of the Jewish and other dtracints , the same concern for self-preservation 
in partibus peregtinorum was, however, more apt to express itself in the 
antithetical policy of self-isolation, since a scattered and physically im¬ 
potent minority might more reasonably hope for success in the limited 
task of defending its own cultural heritage against contamination through 
the influence of the surrounding Gentile majority than in the ambitiously 
offensive-defensive cultural strategy of seeking to ensure its own sur- 

1 Sec IV. iv. 181-4 for a critique of the Manchester School's outlook. 

* 2 Kings xvii. 6 and xviii. 11. 



ROLES, REACTIONS, AND DENOUEMENTS 473 
yival by converting an alien majority to the minority’s peculiar way of 
life. Self-isolation in reply to molestation is another variety of the type of 
reaction that operates on a different plane from the action to which it is 
a rejoinder; and this policy of ‘isolationism’ presents itself in its simplest 
form when it is practised, not as a tour de force by a diaspork without a 
home of its own, but as a line of least resistance by a society whose 
habitat happens to be a physical fastness. 

An insular Japanese Society, that was eventually to be driven into res¬ 
ponding by a compromising retort in kind to the irresistible importunity 
of an industrialized nineteenth-century Western Civilization, had once 
successfully met the less potent impact of a pre-industrial West by 
insulating itself within the then still effective natural frontiers of its coast¬ 
line; and this retort of physical self-isolation which a seventeenth- 
century Japan was able to make to Portuguese intruders on the strength 
of her insularity was made to the same unwelcome strangers by a con¬ 
temporary Abyssinia 1 on the strength of her precipitous canons and her 
impregnable ambas. The lesser highland fastnesses of Sasun and the 
Tur-'Abdin enabled a Gregorian Armenian and a Jacobite Syrian frag¬ 
ment of the same Monophysite fossil of an extinct Syriac Society to have 
recourse to the same policy; 1 and a plateau of Tibet which dwarfed the 
plateau of Abyssinia provided an all but inaccessible highland fastness 
for a Tantric Mahayanian fossil of an extinct Indie Society; 3 but none of 
these resorts to a physical isolationism that was Man’s occasional un¬ 
earned increment from Nature’s geographical caprice could compare in 
historical interest and importance with the psychological isolationism 
which was a diaspora’s retort to the same challenge of a threat to its sur¬ 
vival ; for a diaspora had to face this threat in geographical circumstances 
in which, so far from being peculiarly sheltered by some natural rampart 
or some natural moat, it was peculiarly at the mercy of its neighbours 
through having been artificially deprived of the home of its own which 
had been a normal community’s patrimony. 

While isolationism of either the physical or the psychological type is 
a conspicuous instance of a retort that is dissimilar in character to the 
act of aggression which has provoked it, this elusive retort to molestation 
is a strictly negative way of seeking to capture the initiative by carrying 
the encounter on to new ground; and, wherever this negative reaction 
has met with any measure of success, it will usually be found to have 
been accompanied by other reactions which have likewise differed in 
kind from the original act of aggression but which have been, in them¬ 
selves, of a positive order. In the life of a diaspora its psychological 
self-isolation from the surrounding Gentile majority would be psycholo¬ 
gically intolerable if this daily ordeal were not felt to be a necessary negative 
means to the supremely desirable positive end of safeguarding a precious 
cultural heritage; and an obstinately peculiar people that was militarily 
and politically at the surrounding majority’s mercy would also be unable 
to hold its own in the pursuit of this aim of cultural survival if it did not 
at the same time develop on the economic plane a special efficiency in 
the exploitation of such economic opportunities as had been left open to 

« Sec II. ii. 365-7. * See II. ii. 258. J See II. ii. 405. n. 1. 



474 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
it by the surrounding majority’s inadvertence. An almost uncanny apti¬ 
tude for economic specialization and a meticulous observance of jots and 
tittles of a traditional law are indeed a diaspora’s two main positive 
devices for providing itself with artificial substitutes for the loaves and 
fishes and the lares et penates that are the natural birthright of un¬ 
uprooted communities. 1 

The device of economic specialization, which is one element in a 
diaspora’s response to the supreme challenge of having been uprooted 
from its home, may also be hit upon by an unuprooted society that has 
not been deprived of its home but has merely been debarred from con¬ 
tinuing to enlarge its bounds. In other contexts 1 we have noticed how, 
when the Hellenes were prevented by the establishment of the Cartha¬ 
ginian and Achacmcnian empires from continuing to provide for an 
increasing population by enlarging the geographical domain of a tradi¬ 
tional subsistence economy, they responded by developing a new-fangled 
economy of specialized production for export, in exchange for imported 
food-supplies, that enabled them to find a livelihood for a larger popula¬ 
tion within now' stationary geographical limits. 

The device of replying to force by a retort on the cultural plane, 
which is the second string to a diaspora’s bow, has likewise also been 
practised by societies that have been hard hit by the impact of an alien 
Power without having been reduced to a diaspora’s desperate straits. 
The Orthodox Christian ra'iyeh of the 'Osmanlis and the Hindu ra'iyeh 
of the Mughals both alike succeeded in turning the tables on these 
victorious men of the sword by a militarily impotent penman’s intel¬ 
lectual counter-stroke. The Muslim conquerors of India and Orthodox 
Christendom allowed the mirage of their own past military triumphs to 
keep them blinded to the realities of a subsequent chapter of history in 
which their kingdom was being divided and given to the Franks, till 
their dethronement by these new amphibious lords of Sea and Land was 
already an accomplished fact. The ra'iyeh, whose one surviving weapon 
was the nimbleness of their wits, foresaw the coming triumph of the 
West in time once again to adapt themselves to a new order. A mental 
flexibility that they had once displayed in mastering the arts of their 
Turkish conquerors’ Islamic Civilization now served them equally well 
in another timely transfer of their cultural allegiance. This manoeuvre of 
the Brahmans and the Phanariots—which might be described as a 
‘mental encirclement’ to distinguish it from the geographical encircle¬ 
ment of the same slumbering Islamic World by Portuguese mariners and 
Cossack backwoodsmen—was a far more effective retort to a Mughal 
and an Ottoman military domination than the unimaginative reply to 
force with force which was made by the MarSthas and the klcphts. 

A Chiot and Bengali intelligentsia’s virtuosity in taking the cultural 
impress of successive alien ascendancies was, on the other hand, a less 
telling retort to a military conqueror than a Syriac diaspora’s feat of 
impressing its own culture on the Medes and Persians. This Syriac 
cultural feat of assimilating politically dominant barbarians was emu- 

' See II. ii. 208-50, and pp. 272-313, above. 

* In I. i. 24-26; III. iii. 139-40 and 197; and pp. 429-30, above. 



ROLES, REACTIONS, AND DENOUEMENTS 4 75 
lated by the main body of the Far Eastern Society when it successively 
assimilated the Khitan, the Kin, and the Manchus; but the Far Eastern 
culture failed to work the same magic with Mongol barbarians whose 
barbarism had been fortified with a tincture of the Far Western Christ¬ 
ian culture before they had crossed the Great Wall; and the Far 
Eastern Civilization had never, down to the time of writing, achieved 
any cultural conquest at all comparable to the Syriac Society’s culminat¬ 
ing cultural achievement of eventually assimilating the'entire body 
social of a Babylonic Civilization that had originally forced this long- 
drawn-out encounter upon Syriac victims of an Assyrian militarism . 1 
This cultural revanche for a military conquest which the Syriac Civiliza¬ 
tion consummated at a far advanced stage of its own decline and fall 
was perhaps not, however, so extraordinary a triumph as a posthumous 

S acific retort to a belated Syriac coup de force that was made by the 
yriac Society’s perennial rival, Hellenism. After a moribund Hellenic 
Society had received its death-blow from Primitive Muslim Arab con¬ 
querors who had swept away the last vestiges of Roman rule over right¬ 
fully Syriac territory, Hellenism retorted, as we have seen, in the 
'Abbasid Age, by winning an entry for Hellenic philosophy and science 
into a society that had previously shown itself indifferent to all facets of 
the Hellenic culture. This posthumous radiation of an abstract of Hel¬ 
lenism produced an afterglow of Hellenic intellectual activity in an 
Arabic medium that was as brilliant as the colours cast upon a cloud- 
banked eastern sky by a sun whose disk has already disappeared from 
view below a darkening western horizon. 

All these non-violent responses to the challenge of force that have so 
far been passed in review are, of course, eclipsed by the supremely 
pacific and at the same time supremely positive response of creating a 
higher religion. The impact of an Hellenic Society on its Oriental con¬ 
temporaries was answered in this fashion by the epiphany of Cybele- 
worship, Isis-worship, Mithraism, Christianity, and the Mahayana in 
the bosom of an Hellenic internal proletariat in which the children of 
the conquered Oriental societies had been forcibly enrolled. A military 
impact of the Babylonic Society on the Syriac evoked the epiphany of 
Judaism and Zoroastrianism; and the Turkish conquests of a Hindu and 

1 The measure of the difference is given by the survival in China, down to the twen¬ 
tieth century of the Christian Era, of an Islam that had been introduced in the thirteenth 
and fourteenth centuries by Muslim military colonists in the service of the Mongol 
conquerors. These enclaves of Muslim population in China had so far successfully 
resisted assimilation, though they were geographically isolated from the main body of 
Dar-al-Isldm. One of the secrets of this Chinese Muslim diaspora's success in preserving 
its identity was no doubt its tact in falling in with traditional Chinese ways in trivial 
matters of external observance which would have been shockingly conspicuous to non- 
Chinese Muslim eyes. In the mosque of a Muslim village near Peking which the writer of 
this Study visited in December 1929 the Arabic texts on the walls were written vertically, 
Chinesc-fashion, instead of being written horizontally from right to left; and the roof- 
ridges were bestridden by the same figurines of mock-ferocious guardian genii that would 
have been found there if the building had been a Buddhist or a Taoist temple and not 
the shrir.e of a religion which banned ‘graven images*. Before the fall of the imperial 
regime in China, the Chinese Muslims had even reconciled themselves to honouring 
the reigning emperor in the customary Chinese fashion by setting up tablets in his 
honour in their places of worship. They had persuaded themselves that this was merely 
the outward visible sign of a harmless civil rite, and was not 'the abomination of desola¬ 
tion’ (see Broomhall, M.: Islam in China (London 1910, Morgan and Scott), p. 1S6). 


476 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
an Orthodox Christian world were likewise answered on the religious 
plane by the gospels of Nanak and Bcdr-ed-Dln. This religious type of 
response, however, carries us beyond the limits of our present inquiry 
into the divers ways in which one civilization may respond to a challenge 
delivered by another; for, when an encounter between two civilizations 
thus gives occasion for a higher religion to make its appearance on the 
stage of History, the entry of this new actor signifies the opening of a 
fresh play with a different cast and plot. 

If, on this account, we leave the epiphanies of higher religions out of 
our reckoning in reviewing the alternative possible reactions to an ini¬ 
tiative taken by one of the characters in a play in which the dramatis 
personae are civilizations, we can perhaps arrive at the following con¬ 
clusions concerning the relative efficacy of divers types of reaction as 
alternative methods of wresting the initiative out of the original agent’s 
hands. We may conclude that the least effective reply is the retort in 
kind, particularly when it is a retort to force by force; that the negative 
retort of isolationism is less effective than positive retorts on either the 
economic or the cultural plane; and that, of the divers alternative 
possible cultural retorts, a pliant receptivity to the culture of a militarily 
or politically dominant aggressor is of less avail than the resilient spirit 
that turns the tables on the military conqueror by taking him culturally 
captive. 

( C ) ALTERNATIVE POSSIBLE DENOUEMENTS 

Among the divers variations on the plot of the drama of an encounter 
between contemporaries, the swiftest and simplest denouement is an 
outright repulse of the original agent’s attempt to induce or compel the 
reagent to become a convert to the agent’s way of life. 

This was the outcome of the encounter between the Japanese offshoot 
of the Far Eastern Society and the Western Society in its still would-be 
Christian 'Early Modern’ phase. After giving the intrusive culture a trial, 
the Japanese decided not to allow themselves to be captivated by it, and 
they gave effect to their decision by expelling the Portuguese traders, 
suppressing the Japanese converts to a post-Tridentine Catholic Western 
Christianity, and almost completely insulating Japan from further con¬ 
tact with the Western World. 

This is a classic case of the offer and rejection of an alien culture, be¬ 
cause the heralds of the Early Modern Western Christian Civilization in 
Japan lacked the power to impose their way of life by force or even to 
offer any forcible resistance to their forcible repulse by the Japanese 
authorities. When a Medieval Western Christian Civilization was re¬ 
pelled by the Muslims and Orthodox Christians, an Islamic Civilization 
by the Orthodox Christians and Hindus, and a Babylonic Civilization by 
the Syriac peoples, the reagent who was thus reasserting himself on the 
cultural plane was retorting to an assault on the original agent’s part 
which had been, not merely violent, but, on the plane of violence, 
victorious. The Crusaders, 'Osmanlis, Mughals, Assyrians, and Baby¬ 
lonians had made their impact as military aggressors, not as merchants 
or missionaries; and we have seen that, when the Crusaders’ Medieval 



ROLES, REACTIONS, AND DENOUEMENTS 477 
Wcstem Christian culture was rejected by Ayyubids and Lascarids, and 
the Turkish empire-builders’ Islamic culture by hajduks and klcphts 
and Marathas, the rejection took the form of a retort to force by force. 
We have also seen that the rejection of the Islamic culture by the Phana- 
riots and the Brahmans took the alternative form of a pacific transfer of 
cultural allegiance; and that the Syriac victims of Assyrian militarism 
triumphantly turned the tables on their conquerors without ever having 
it in their power to fight this cultural battle by force of arms. 

While these encounters thus display a wide diversity in the matter of 
the use of force, they resemble one another in all ending in the same 
denouement. An encounter between Japan and the West in which the 
Japanese retorted by force to pacific Western overtures, and an en¬ 
counter between the Syriac Society and the Babylonic World in which 
an Assyrian militarism was foiled by its Syriac victims’ ‘non-violent 
non-resistance’, both ended alike in the rejection of the intrusive culture 
by the party on which it had impinged. 

In a case in which the act of rejection had been consummated, whether 
by violent or by non-violent measures on the molested society’s part, the 
historian would be justified in concluding that the incident was thereby 
closed if the societies concerned were extinct by the historian’s own day; 
but, if they were then still alive, he would be better advised to keep an 
open mind in the light of other passages of history which justified the 
proverb that ‘where there is life there is hope’. An Orthodox Christ¬ 
endom and an Islamic Society that had rejected the Western Civiliza¬ 
tion in its medieval phase, and a Japanese Society that had subseqjiently 

rejected it in its early modern phase, all afterwards fell under its spell 
when it offered itself for sale in a deconsecrated form in which a lucrative 
technology had been substituted for a redoubtable Christianity as the 
pearl of great price which a buyer was invited to acquire. So long as the 
parties remained alive, it could never be taken for granted that the re¬ 
pulse of an agent’s advances was definitive, since History testified that 
an apparently conclusive rejection had sometimes been followed by a 
sensational volte-face; and the same caution was advisable in regard to 
denouements of the antithetical type in which the agent’s advances had 
been so successful that they had resulted, to all appearance, in the cul¬ 
tural conversion of the party to whom they had been addressed; for 
History also testified that an acceptance, as well as a rejection, of cul¬ 
tural overtures might prove not to have been definitive. Here, again, the 
historian could not pronounce a confident judgement except in cases 
where none of the parties to the encounter was any longer alive. 

On this test it could be declared with confidence by a Modern Western 
student of History that a long since extinct Syriac Society had definitively 
succeeded in assimilating a long since extinct Egyptiac Society by con¬ 
verting it to the Monophysite variety of Christianity in the fifth and 
sixth centuries of the Christian Era and to Islam between the ninth 
century and the thirteenth; and there could likewise be no doubt about 
an extinct Hellenic Society’s success in assimilating an extinct Hittite 
Society’s Etruscan offshoot and Cappadocian main body. A nineteenth- 
century Western observer might have felt an equal confidence in reckoning 


478 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
as permanent acquisitions of the Western World the territorial gains 
that a Medieval Western Christendom had made at Dar-al-IslSm’s and 
Orthodox Christendom’s expense in the Iberian Peninsula, Sicily, and 
Southern Italy; but this sanguine Victorian’s twentieth-century epigoni 
might be deterred from endorsing their grandfather’s verdict on the out¬ 
come of an episode in the medieval chapter of Western history by their 
own experience of witnessing the reopening of a nineteenth-century 
issue on which their grandfather’s verdict would probably have been no 
less self-assured. In the nineteenth century of the Christian Era it had 
looked as if the main body of Orthodox Christendom had made up its 
mind to cast in its lot with the West, and this Orthodox Christian act of 
conversion to a secular Modern Western culture seemed to be finally 
confirmed when, after the World War of a.d. 1914-18, the Ottoman 
Turks decided at last to follow in their former subjects’ footsteps with¬ 
out hesitations or reservations. Yet, at the very moment when the 
Westernization of the Turks, Albanians, Bulgars, Rumans, Serbs, and 
Greeks might have been thought to be assured, Russia stepped into the 
arena to contest the West’s cultural conquest of an Ottoman Orthodox 
Christendom’s former domain by proclaiming there the gospel of Com¬ 
munism as an alternative ideal to the contemporary Modern Western 
way of life. 

At the time of writing, it was still impossible for an observer to fore¬ 
cast the outcome of this Russian attempt in South-Eastern Europe and 
Turkey to reverse a process of Westernization that had gone so far as to 
have come to appear irrevocable before Russia delivered her challenge. 
But an historian could lay his finger on cases in which a similar process of 
cultural conversion had in fact been challenged and reversed at a stage at 
which it had been at least as far advanced. 

In a post-AIexandrine Hellenic World, for instance, the dominance of 
Hellenism seemed in the third century b.c. to be as secure as the domin¬ 
ance of a secular Modern Western culture seemed to be in the nine¬ 
teenth century of the Christian Era; and on the eve of the first eruption 
of fanatical Hellenophobia in Egypt circa 210 b.c. 1 even an intelligent 
and perceptive onlooker might have committed himself to the prophecy 
that the Hittitc, Syriac, Egyptiac, and Babylonic worlds, which Hellen¬ 
ism had already subjugated on the political plane, were destined to be 
converted to the Hellenic culture no less thoroughly than the Hittite 
Society’s already Hcllcnized Etruscan offshoot. Even if our observer 
had lived to witness, not only the successive anti-Hellenic outbreaks in 
Egypt at the turn of the third and second centuries b.c., but also the 
fateful outbreak in Judaea in 166 b.c., he would probably have been less 
deeply impressed by these portents of an adverse turn in a cultural tide 
that had been flowing previously in Hellenism’s favour than by the 
sensational further expansion of the Hellenes’ political dominion in 
183 b.c., when Demetrius of Bactria achieved at one lightning stroke an 
Hellenic conquest of India that had proved beyond the range of Alex¬ 
ander the Great. 

In this case, however, our acquaintance with the eight-hundred-years- 

« Sec V. v. 68. 



ROLES, REACTIONS, AND DENOUEMENTS 479 
long subsequent course of an encounter between Hellenism and its 
Oriental contemporaries informs us that, of all the vast non-Hellcnic 
territories—extending eastward from a Phrygian penumbra of Hellas in 
Anatolia to the heart of an Indie World in the Jumna-Gangcs Duab— 
which had been conquered by Hellenic arms within 150 years of Alex¬ 
ander’s crossing of the Dardanelles, the only fraction that was Hellenized 
irrevocably in the ultimate event was the fragment of a long since 
shattered Hittite World that lay to the west of Amanus and Antitaurus. 
East of that line, which ran at so short a remove to the east of a 
pre-Alexandrine Hellenism’s eastern cultural frontier in the Central 
Anatolian Desert, the gospel of Hellenism had been decisively rejected 
everywhere before this cultural defeat was clinched in the seventh 
century of the Christian Era by the military exploits of the Primitive 
Muslim Arabs. The denouement of this long-drawn-out drama was the 
tardy and gradual but ultimately complete and conclusive reversal of a 
process of Hellenization which had looked irresistible in its heyday. 

This dramatic cultural contest between the Hellenic Civilization and 
its Oriental contemporaries shared the stage of history with another 
drama in which the same dramatis personae were engaged in the unfold¬ 
ing of a different plot. In the tragedy in which a post-Alcxandrinc Hel¬ 
lenism was the protagonist the issue was the question whether the 
Hellenic culture was to be irrevocably accepted or eventually rejected by 
Oriental societies that had been conquered by Hellenic force of arms, 
and the denouement was an ultimate expurgation of Hellenism from 
non-Hellcnic souls which had seemed for a time to have been decisively 
captivated by its charm. In a simultaneously performed mystery play the 
dramatic theme was not a contest but was an act of creation, and the 
protagonist was a new-born society of a different species from the civili¬ 
zations of the second generation whose encounter with one another was 
the occasion of this protagonist’s epiphany. The denouement of this 
other drama was the entry of a higher religion into the World. The 
Hellenic Civilization's encounter with the Syriac Civilization gave birth 
to Christianity, and its encounter with the Indie Civilization gave birth 
to the Mahayana. 

The relation between these two plays that were being performed on 
one stage simultaneously was an ironical one. From the standpoint of 
the tragedy of a post-Alexandrine Hellenism the nativity play of Christi¬ 
anity and the Mahayana was an irrelevant interlude, while from the 
standpoint of the nativity play the last act in the Hellenic tragedy was an 
irrelevant epilogue. 

The Hellenic tragedy was not concerned with the contemporary 
epiphany of new societies of a higher order than the Hellenic Civiliza¬ 
tion and its Oriental adversaries. So long as these new-born higher 
religions devoted themselves whole-heartedly to their mission of bring¬ 
ing human souls on Earth into a more intimate communion with God 
than had ever before been within their reach, the religions were above 
the battle that the civilizations were fighting. It was only in so far as 
these religions could be tempted into neglecting their Father’s business 
for the pursuit of mundane objectives that they could be enlisted as 



480 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
gladiators in the conflicting civilizations’ arena; and, in so far as they did 
succumb to this temptation, they were making themselves useful for 
mundane purposes at the price of selling their heavenly birthright. We 
have seen Zoroastrianism and Judaism thus miss their true destiny by 
lending themselves to the mundane enterprise of helping to expel an in¬ 
trusive Hellenism from Syriac ground. Christianity was guilty of the 
same spiritually disastrous deviation into a political career when it put 
on the armour of Nestorius and Eutyches in order to go into action 
against Hellenism as the champion of a resurgent Syriac culture; and, in 
the last act of the Hellenic tragedy, Islam was deliberately converted by 
its own founder from a revelation of God to Arab barbarian souls into 
an anti-Hellenic engine of physical warfare. In the parallel contest be¬ 
tween the Hellenic Civilization and the Indie, Hinduism threw itself 
with an almost Muhammadan whole-heartedness into an anti-Hellenic 
cultural campaign in which a Tantric avatar of the Mah 5 y 5 na had already 
half-heartedly implicated itself. 

From the standpoint of Civilization, these churches, in thus going 
into politics, were meritoriously justifying their existence by 'making 
history’, since they were playing a decisive part in an Oriental counter¬ 
offensive against Hellenism which was the crowning act in the tragedy of 
the Hellenes’ cultural conflict with the Orientals. Thanks to the inter¬ 
vention of Islam, a Syriac universal state that had been established by 
the Achaemenidae and had been overthrown by Alexander was re¬ 
established in the shape of the Caliphate; thanks to the intervention of 
Hinduism, an Indie universal state that had been established by the 
Mauryas and had been swept away by Demetrius of Bactria was re¬ 
established by the Guptas. These political achievements of Hinduism 
and Islam were the conclusive evidences of an intrusive Hellenism’s final 
discomfiture and were on that account events of supreme historical im¬ 
portance from the mundane standpoint of an historical drama in which 
the dramatis personae were civilizations. On the other hand, from the 
otherworldly standpoint of a mystery play the outcome of a cultural 
conflict between Hellenism and the contemporary Oriental civilizations 
was a matter of spiritual indifference. The gospel of Christianity and the 
Mahayana was addressed, not to societies, but to souls; and any soul in 
any social environment was a potential convert to the way of salvation, 1 
whatever might be the colour of the cultural veneer that this soul had 
casually acquired through the chances and changes of mundane social 
history. 

It will be seen that our religious and our secular drama are written in 
two different languages which each defy translation into the other. From 
the religious standpoint of the preachers of spiritual salvation the secular 
drama is a vanity of vanities; 2 from the secular standpoint of the parties 
to an encounter between civilizations the religious drama is unto the 
Jews a stumbling-block and unto the Greeks foolishness. 3 


1 Acts xvi. 17. 


J 1 Cor. i. 23. 


* Eccl. i. 2. 



D. THE PROCESSES OF RADIATION 
AND RECEPTION 

(I) THE DIFFUSION OF CULTURE 

I F the drama of encounters between contemporaries moves a spectator 
to inquire into the processes through which the dramatis personae 
produce their social and psychological effects on one another, his first 
observation will be that such encounters may occur without any such 
effects following from them. If the original agent’s overture meets with 
a sheer rebuff on the reagent’s part, their encounter will have come and 
gone without any intercourse between them arising from it at all; and, if the 
overture takes the form of a violent assault to which the reagent replies 
by a retort in kind, then the interaction may be energetic without ap¬ 
preciably transcending the physical plane that is the field of interaction 
between inanimate objects. No doubt, in a collision in which the collid¬ 
ing 'bodies’ are not stocks or stones but are human beings, wc may be 
sure that—at any rate in cases in which both parties arc civilizations— 
there will always be some spiritual, as well as physical, consequence, and 
that this transmission of spiritual influences will also always be in some 
measure reciprocal.' In another context we have observed that War— 
even war between a civilization and its transfrontier barbarians across 
the estranging barrier of a limes —is a social relation through which the 
parties produce spiritual as well as physical effects on one another. 1 2 * But 
manifestly the spiritual intercourse that arises from encounters between 
civilizations can be studied most profitably in cases in which the original 
agent’s initiative results in a successful penetration of the assaulted 
party’s spiritual defences—whether the ultimate denouement be a com¬ 
plete and lasting assimilation of this assaulted part}' by the assailant or 
whether it be an eventual expurgation of the intrusive culture from the 
assaulted party’s temporarily infected body social, either with or without 
a previous act of creation on the religious plane .3 

Spiritual intercourse has a modus operandi of its own. When one 
civilization does succeed in exerting a cultural influence on the life of a 
contemporary society, this spiritual event is accomplished through a 
process of give and take which may be called ‘cultural radiation’ on the 
agent’s part and ‘cultural reception’ on the reagent’s in terms borrowed 
from the language of the Modern Western science of Physics. In the 
language used in this Study for conveying the Soul’s obscure intuition of 
the mysteries of Life, ‘cultural radiation’ may be described as being a 
challenge presented to a civilization by one of its neighbours, and 
‘cultural reception’ as being a particular orientation of the challenged 
party’s faculty of mimesis. 4 A mimesis that, in the internal life of a 

1 See pp. 465-6, above. 

2 Sec VIII, especially pp. 13-19 and 39-44. above. 

J These alternative possible denouements of encounters between contemporaries 
have been surveyed on pp. 476-80, above. 

* The Human Psyche’s ability to vary the orientation of its mimesis is one manifesta- 

B SSOP.vra R 







482 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION 
society, is directed backwards towards ancestral guardians of tradition 
when the society is stagnant, and forwards towards living pioneers when 
the society is on the move , 1 is directed outwards towards an alien way of 
life in a society that has fallen under a neighbouring civilization’s 
ascendancy . 2 

tion of a general versatility which is characteristic of Human Nature and is perhaps 
its most distinctive gift. 

‘Heredity with the human individual comes more and more to mean, not (as in the 
case of animals) the predisposition or capacity to act or react in certain definite ways, 
but the general capacity of experience, the capacity to learn or acquire in the individual 
life the power to act in an indefinite number of ways. In the human inheritance general 
educability takes the place of definite specific hereditary functions. ... In other words, 
the inheritance of Mind supersedes the organic inheritance more and more.... Nothing 
shows more clearly the revolution which the appearance of Mind has wrought than this 
far-reaching transformation which it has eiTccted in the methods and procedure of 
Organic Evolution. On the animal plane structure still largely determines function, but 
on the human plane mental plasticity so dominates everything else in the inheritance 
that the importance of structure is completely dwarfed, and it appears as a subordinate 
factor in the total human situation’ (Smuts, J. C.: Holism and Evolution, 2nd cd. (Lon¬ 
don 1927, Macmillan), p. 261). 

1 See 11. i. 192. 

* An amusing example of the reorientation of the faculty of mimesis in response to 
the influence of a potently radio-active alien culture is presented in the following 
experience of a Western archaeologist who was travelling in an out-of-the-way rural 
district of Anatolia about the year a . d . 1924, approximately half-way through the first 
phase of the totalitarian Westernizing revolution that was being carried out at the time 
in Turkey under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal AtatQrk. 

The purpose of the archaeologist’s journey in Anatolia was to enlarge, by fresh dis¬ 
coveries, the corpus of Greek inscriptions, dating from the post-Alexandrine Age of 
Hellenic history, that was being built up by Modem Western scholarship. Since a high 
proportion of the Anatolian Greek inscriptions that had already been brought to light 
nod been discovered on site* that had been holy ground at the time when the inscriptions 
had been set up there, a pioneer archaeologist's first objective in a previously unexplored 
locality was to identify the site on which the chief local temple or shrine had stood in the 
Hellenic Age of Anatolian history; and the vicissitudes of archaeological field-work had 
demonstrated that the key to the identification of the local holy places of the Hellenic 
Age was to be found in the continuity of Anatolian religious history. In an Anatolian 
town or village the local indwelling numen had been apt to abide in the same spot 
through successive metamorphoses of nomenclature, liturgical language, ritual, myth, 
and theology; and accordingly the spot that was holy ground in the Islamic phase of 
Anatolian religion would be a promising site to explore for the purpose of unearthing 
Greek dedicator inscriptions. Since, in the never more than superficially Islamicized 
rural districts of Anatolia, the principal numinous object was still often a sacred tree, 
the archaeologist from whose lips the writer heard the story that he is about to recite 
had made it a rule of thumb to start operations, in any Anatolian village that he was 
visiting for the first time by asking to be shown the sacred tree, and in previous cam¬ 
paigns he had had no difficulty in eliciting this information, since, in the pre-Kemalian 
Age, the local sacred tree had been the pride of every Anatolian village that had been for¬ 
tunate enough to possess one of these highly charged batteries of numinous power. 
When the writer’s friend made this usual opening gambit of his in one village some five 
years after the date of the Kcmalian Revolution’s outbreak, he was therefore surprised 
to be met by the assembled male population with a unanimous denial of the existence 
of any sacred tree in their village. The explanation of this unexpected answer was soon 
forthcoming, however; for, after the visitor’s ceremonial public reception by the villagers 
er, masse, the younger men took their leave, and, as soon as the coast was clear, the 
elders took the stranger aside and whispered to him furtively: ‘Of course, we have a 
sacred tree really, and, now that those young fellows are out of the way, we shall be 
delighted to take you to see it.’ The Western visitor then realized that the old men’s 
lips had been sealed in the presence of young men who, unlike their elders, had become 
sufficiently Western-minded to feel that a sacred tree was a shameful relic of Antiquity 
on which a Western visitor must not be allowed to set eyes. The now secretly initiated 
visitor of course wished nothing better than to put himself in the old men’s hands, and 
they duly led him through the village to a spot where, sure enough, there stood a tree 
whose exuberant holiness was proclaimed by the luxuriance of the votive offerings of 
rags with which every twig was adorned. While the archaeologist was looking at this 
beacon with all the eagerness of a hound that has just caught the scent, the village police¬ 
man—who was not only a member of the younger generation but was also the official 



THE DIFFUSION OF CULTURE 483 

Every living human society, like every living individual human being, 
is all the time emitting waves of spiritual radiation which travel out¬ 
wards through Space and onwards through Time till they impinge on 
other societies or other individuals whom they happen to strike. Con¬ 
versely, every society, like every individual, is also all the time being 
bombarded by ‘rays’ or ‘projectiles’ of spiritual radiation emanating 
from other societies or individuals, and is all the time either repelling 
this rain of spiritual missiles or, in so far as its defences are penetrated, 
is being affected by these influences from outside. 1 

The children of a new era in the history of Mankind that had been 
inaugurated by the founders of the higher religions were familiar with 
the truth that the spiritual influence of a prophet might continue to make 
its effect on human souls long after the prophet’s death and far away 
from the physically circumscribed scene of his activity during his own 
brief life-time. In a Modern Western city of London in which the writer 
of this Study was putting these words on paper in the year 1949 of the 
Christian Era at a point on the surface of the globe that was more than 
two thousand miles distant from Nazareth as the plane flies, no living 
resident, among all the millions then congregated there, was exerting an 
influence on his contemporaries and neighbours that could in any way 
be compared with the spiritual effect that was being produced by Jesus 
of Nazareth in London at that moment. If, in the same year, the writer 
had made the journey from his home in London to the heart of Tropical 
Africa, he could have verified the truth that societies as well as souls can 
be spiritually radioactive; for in a.d. 1949 he could have picked up in the 
Bahr-al-Ghazal or even on the Gold Coast the cultural radiation of an 
Egyptiac Civilization that had been extinct, at the longest reckoning of 
its life-span, since the fifth century of the Christian Era, and that had 
never during its lifetime succeeded in extending its political domain into 
Tropical Africa farther south than the Jazlrah between the White and 
Blue Niles.* 

This continuing radiation of an extinct Egyptiac culture, in competi¬ 
tion with a living Western culture, in regions that had been beyond the 
Egyptiac Society’s geographical horizon during its lifetime, is a counter¬ 
part in the Spiritual Universe of a phenomenon observed in the Physical 
Universe by Modern Western astronomers whose calculations showed 
that, by the time when the light emitted by a star had reached the eyes 
of observers on our planet in the course of an almost unimaginably long 
passage through Time and Space, the star which had thus now at last 
become visible might be no longer in existence and might indeed have 

representative, in partibut agricolarum, of Ankara’s new Westernizing ideology—came 
running up and, perceiving, to his chagrin, that he had not been in time to prevent the 
confrontation of the Western observer with the tell-tale rag-bedecked branches, began, 
as soon as he came within hailing distance, to shout: ‘Do not touch them! Danger of 
infection! Microbe! Microbe 1 * 

The story here breaks off, without going on to tell whether in this case the identifica¬ 
tion of the sacred tree was rewarded with the discovery of an epigraphical treasure-trove. 

1 The impact of the civilizations on the primitive societies has been noticed in I. i. 
149, and the impact of the ‘unrelated’ civilizations on the ‘related’ civilizations in II. i. 
184-7. The question whether the apparently ‘unrelated’ civilizations themselves may 
not have been brought to birth by responses to human, as well as physical, challenges 
has been raised in II. i. 335-8. * See II. ii. 116-17. 



484 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION 
been annihilated many aeons ago. In our own study of human history 1 
we have similarly had to reckon with the probability that the Egyptiac 
Civilization and the other representatives of the first generation of this 
species of society had radiated their cultural influence abroad so vigor¬ 
ously that every then still surviving ci-dccant primitive society in the 
World had already been adulterated through being affected by this in¬ 
fluence in some degree before the genesis of the civilizations of the second 
generation in the second millennium b.c. 

In the view of one twentieth-century Western scholar, this world-wide 
radiation of the civilizations of the first generation was the source of 
certain impressively lofty religious activities and ideas that were common 
to a number of primitive societies still surviving in this century of the 
Christian Era in physically secluded nooks and corners so remote from 
one another that it was impossible to suppose that there could have been 
any direct give-and-take between these widely dispersed societies since 
their arrival in their respective latter-day habitats. Another twentieth- 
century Western scholar sought to account for the same cultural pheno¬ 
menon of the presence of common features in the religion of scattered 
surviving representatives of Primitive Man by the suggestion that the 
hypothetical culture-wave which was presumed to have left this uniform 
impress on them might not have emanated from any civilization even of 
the first generation, but might have been carried to the ends of the Earth 
by the primitive migrants themselves as an integral and vital part of a 
common spiritual heritage from ancestors of sub-human origin who had 
been transfigured into human beings by this divine illumination of their 
souls. 1 

Whatever the true answer might be to a question concerning the 
history of Religion which was as elusive as it was momentous, it was an 
indisputable matter of fact that, in more recent times, religious practices, 
institutions, and beliefs had travelled far in Space-Time over the habit¬ 
able surface of this planet. In the present Part of this Study we have 
surveyed the diffusion of the Syriac and Hellenic cultures over the Old 
World, and the diffusion of the Modern Western culture round the 
globe. 3 The writer of this Study had, in April 1923, the rare good fortune 
to catch one of these Modern Western culture-waves in the act of reach¬ 
ing one of its successive destinations. In that month of that year he 
arrived at Ankara at the same moment as ‘the Ideas of 1789’, and enjoyed 
the experience—quite invaluable for an historian—of seeing these 
spiritual potencies, which in their Western birthplace had long since 
become savourless through familiarity, still produce their primordial 
stimulating effect with all the vividness of novelty. At Ankara in a.d. 
1923 an observer could recapture an experience which his great-grand¬ 
father might have enjoyed in Paris 134 years earlier; 4 and, if one of his 

' In II. i. 187; V. V. 197; and VII. vii. 760-1. 

2 The question at issue between Father W. Schmidt and Mrs. N. K. Chadwick has 
been examined in VII. vii. 760-t. 

J See pp. 439-47, 403-18, and 126-346, above. 

* The distance from Paris to Ankara, which it had thus taken 'the Ideas of 1789’ 
134 years to travel, had been covered by the writer’s body in five days, travelling by rail. 
'Our echoes roll from soul to soul and Rrow for ever and for ever', but the persistence 
and pervasiveness of the diffusion of culture-waves is matched by the slowness of their 



THE DIFFUSION OF CULTURE 485 

rather more remote ancestors had visited Uppsala on the eve of the con¬ 
version of Sweden to Christianity, this Frank living at the close of the 
first millennium of the Christian Era might have caught still alive in 
Ultima Thule a body of religious ritual and myth which had been 
launched into the World from a cradle in the Land of Shinar perhaps no 
less than 3,500 years back. 

In other contexts wc have observed the phenomenon of ‘living 
museums’ where, on the outer edge of the domain of a culture that has 
been geographically expansive, the culture has been ‘frozen’ in a phase that 
has subsequently become obsolete at and round the centre from which 
the successive waves of this culture’s radiation have been emitted. 1 We 
have likewise watched the first embryo of a higher religion—the worship 
of a Suffering Son and of his Sorrowing Mother—travelling from its 
Sumcric source in the Land of Shinar into Egypt via Syria and into 
Scandinavia via Anatolia in the era of the civilizations of the first genera¬ 
tion ; 2 and, in the oecumenical history of a later age, wc have watched 
successive waves of Judaic and Indie religion washing round and break¬ 
ing over the fastness-plateaux of Abyssinia and Tibet. 5 

This social phenomenon of culture-waves can be illustrated from the 
history of secular institutions as well as from the history of Religion.< 

One remarkable instance is the re-emergence in the New World, in 
the sixteenth century of the Christian Era, of a monopolist ‘thalassocracy’ 
which, in its original embodiment in the Western Basin of the Mediter¬ 
ranean, had met a violent death before the close of the third century b.c. 
The Carthaginian Empire was so peculiar an institution 5 that the possi¬ 
bility of its recurrence would have been ruled out in advance by any 
student of History who had not lived late enough to be cognizant of the 
creation of the Castilian Empire of the Indies in the sixteenth century of 
the Christian Era. 

The sixth-century Carthaginian empire-builders had fenced off the 
southern waters of the Western Mediterranean with a ‘wooden wall’ 
stretching from the coast of Tripolitania to the coast of Spain; and, be¬ 
hind this maritime anticipation of a latter-day continental ‘iron curtain', 
the Libyphoenicians had monopolized, on their own terms, the foreign 
trade of a huge hinterland with enormous undeveloped economic poten¬ 
tialities. The profits which the Carthaginian ‘thalassocrats’ managed to 
draw from this method of turning naval power to commercial account 
were, as wc have seen, 6 so lucrative that the profiteers never put them¬ 
selves to the trouble of developing industries of their own to supply the 
economic demand of their effectively ‘cornered’ market. They found it 
more convenient to rely on their insulating sea-power in order to exploit 
Hellenic producers as well as Iberian and African consumers. They 
bought cheap from the Hellenes and sold dear to the natives; and this 
business brought them fabulously high returns until their monopoly was 


pace. The communication of feelings and ideas, or even institutions and techniques, 
from psyche to psyche takes very much longer than the transportation of human bodies 
and other physical objects from station to station. 1 See III. iii. 135-9. 

* See V. v. 81-82 and 147-5*. #n <* P- 453 . *bove. 

J See II. ii. 257, 365, and 40*-7- 4 See V. v. 196-7. 

5 See pp. 426-9 and 437-8, above. ‘ On pp. 437~8. above. 

\ 



486 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION 
broken, after a three-hundred-years-long run, by a fresh shift, on which 
they had not reckoned, in a balance of naval power on which they had 
remained content to depend entirely for the maintenance of their system. 
In the sixth century b.c. the Carthaginians had wrested the naval com¬ 
mand of the Western Mediterranean out of Hellenic hands by uniting 
the naval forces of all the Libyphoenician city-states under a Cartha¬ 
ginian hegemony, and in the third century B.c. they forfeited this vital 
‘thalassocracy’ to a Roman adversary who had overtrumped the Cartha¬ 
ginian sea-power by uniting under a Roman hegemony the naval forces of 
Magna Graecia. This West Mediterranean drama of the establishment, 
abuse, and overthrow of a monopolist ‘thalassocracy’ was re-performed 
in the Caribbean when the Spaniards adopted there the Carthaginians’ 
myopically selfish policy and afterwards duly suffered at French and 
Dutch and British hands the Carthaginians’ Roman fate. 

The Spanish avatar of a peculiar Carthaginian institution is not more 
extraordinary than the reincarnation of a post-Alexandrinc Parthian 
successor-state of the Achaemenian Empire in a Medieval Western 
Christian successor-state of the Roman Empire. 1 

‘The Holy Roman Empire’s’ affinity with the Parthian Empire is 
manifested in a combination of peculiar features that are salient in both 
dispensations. Both regimes were decentralized on a feudal system in 
which a padishah’s juridical suzerainty over his feudatory muluk-at- 
tau'd'if 1 was in practice so ineffective that power continually ebbed away 
from the heart of the body politic into the limbs, without any compen¬ 
satory return-flow, until the commonwealth eventually died of this in¬ 
ability to maintain a healthy circulation of its life-blood. In both empires 
the feudal organization of an agrarian society was picturesquely diversi¬ 
fied by a sprinkling of urban enclaves representing two other social 
orders which were as alien to one another as each of them was to the 
body social in which both were embedded like the currants and sultanas 
in a nineteenth-century English plum cake. Industry and commerce 
were concentrated within the walls of constitutionally governed city- 
states, while a way of life more ancient than cither the city-state or the 
feudal regime was represented by temple-states ruled by priests as vice¬ 
gerents for a presiding deity. 

If the dignitaries of the Parthian Empire could have been recalled to 
life in order to compare notes with their medieval Western ‘opposite 
numbers’, Mithradatcs I (regnabat circa 171-138/7 b.c.) would have 
recognized in Otto I’s (regnabat a.d. 936—73) 3 achievement of partially 

1 See Dcbcvoise, N. C.: A Political History of Parthia (Chicago 1938, Chicago 
University Press), pp. xxxviii-xxxix. 

1 In the constitutional terminology of Islamic scholars who had salvaged some 
tradition of the Parthian Age of Syriac history, the muluk-at-taica’if ('kings of shreds and 
patches') was the technical name for the feudatories of a Parthian King of Kings who was 
entitled to style himself Padishah (‘Foot King’) because his foot was officially planted 
on his vassals’ necks. 

J Mithradatcs I and Otto I both began their reigns ns kings of kingdoms beyond the 
mountains, and both ended their reigns as emperors of empires bestriding the moun¬ 
tains. Otto made his first descent upon Italy in a . d . 951, but he was not crowned 
emperor by the Pope at Rome till a . d . 962. The corresponding dates in Mithradates’ 
career arc his first descent upon Babylonia in hi b.c. and his decisive victory over 
Antiochus Siditfis in 129 B.C. 


THE DIFFUSION OF CULTURE 487 

reconstituting the Carolingian Empire by reuniting Italy and Burgundy 
with Germany a repetition of the Arsacid empire-builder's own achieve¬ 
ment of partially reconstituting the Achaemenian Empire by reuniting 
Media and Babylonia with Khurasan. Artavasdes and Frederick II 
Hohenstaufen would have condoled with one another over their tragic 
common experience of a personal failure that had entailed the extinction 
of the defeated padishah’s dynasty and the liquidation of the body politic 
which he had striven in vain to preserve. The parochial princelings of 
Fars and Brandenburg would have congratulated one another on the 
assiduity with which they had taken advantage of their imperial suzer¬ 
ains' accumulating embarrassments in order gradually to convert a status 
of vassalage into a de facto independence that was sovereignty in every¬ 
thing except the name. The citizens of Seleucia-on-Tigris and Scleucia- 
on-Eulaeus would have agreed with the burghers of Augsburg and 
Cologne that eternal vigilance was the palladium of their precarious 
civic liberties. The chief priest of the temple of Anahita at Ecbatana 
(Hamadan) or of^the Zoroastrian fire-altar Adhur-Gushnasp at Ganjak 1 
would have been astonished to meet his double in the person of a prince- 
bishop of Salzburg or of Trier. And a Parthian cataphract, confronted 
with a Medieval Western knight, would have spent blissful hours in dis¬ 
cussing the comparative merits of the two iron-clad horsemen’s chargers, 
coats of mail, shields, and lance-shafts. 

The cataphract is an element in this migratory cultural complex 
which enables us to catch the cultural wave in the act of travelling 
through Space-Time from the Iran of the second century b.c. to the Ger¬ 
many of the eleventh century of the Christian Era. The Parthian man- 
at-arms, portrayed in a graffito at Dura, 2 who reappears in Far Eastern 
figurines of the T’ang Age (a.d. 618-907) and in the Bayeux Tapestry, 
won his decisive battle against a phalanx of heavy-armed infantry not 
only in Media in 129 b.c. but at Adrianople in a.d. 378 and at Hastings 
in a.d. 1066. 3 

It would be superfluous to draw' further on the wealth of historical 
examples of the phenomenon of the diffusion of culture in order to 
demonstrate its reality and its importance to a generation whose life was 
being overshadowed by the overwhelming fait accompli of a diffusion of 
the Modem Western culture on a literally world-wide scale. In any 
attempt to estimate the part played by the diffusion of culture in human 
affairs the difficulty lies not in proving that such a process as diffusion 
takes place but in ascertaining whether any particular apparent instance 
of the phenomenon is a genuine instance or not. 

This difficulty arises from the ever present possibility that the event 
or institution or aptitude or idea whose origin we are seeking to trace 
may have been produced, not by the radiation of some past achievement 

1 Sec Christensen, A.: L’lran sous les Satsattides (Copenhagen 1936, Levin and 
Munksgaard), p. 161. 

* See IV. iv. 439, n. 4* 

J This diffraction of a human observer’s vision of a single event into a number of 
instances corresponding to different positions of the same event in Space-Time is the 
inevitable penalty of the observer’s own inescapable handicap of being himself a 
creature of the Space-Time field in which he is taking his observations (see IV. iv. 44s, 
with n. 10). 


488 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION 
from abroad, but by a fresh act of creation here and now. The pheno¬ 
menon of diffusion does not account in itself for the existence of the 
objects that are transmitted; on the contrary, there would be nothing to 
be either radiated or received if some original act of creation had not 
previously occurred; and an act that has been performed once may be 
repeated time and again. We have therefore to be perpetually on our 
guard against falling into the error of invoking the process of diffusion to 
account for some resemblance or identity between two social situations 
at different positions in Time-Space when the true cause of this re¬ 
semblance or identity may be the uniformity of Human Nature, and its 
consequent capacity to repeat an original act of creation in response to 
the recurrence of a challenge, without there having been any transmission 
of influence from the party which made this response on an earlier 
occasion to the party which has made an identical response to an 
identical challenge on a later occasion in virtue of an independent re¬ 
action of the same Human Nature to the same circumstances. 

For example, the indisputable fact that in the twentieth century of the 
Christian Era all surviving non-Wcstern civilizations had been deeply 
penetrated and intimately affected by the radiation of the Modern 
Western culture was no proof that these civilizations themselves were 
merely so many deposits left by some earlier ubiquitous wave of cultural 
radiation, and were not original products of so many independent re¬ 
sponses to so many separate challenges. In a previous context' we have 
come to the conclusion that, when due account has been taken of the 
part played in the geneses of the civilizations by the diffusion of culture- 
elements, cither singly or in complexes, the decisive act by which each 
civilization has been brought to birth proves in every case to have been 
an act of new creation, and not an act of receiving some ready-made gift 
from abroad; and, on the strength of this survey of the evidence, we 
have combated 1 the thesis of a diffusionist school of contemporary 
British archaeologists who believed, not only that a latter-day Modern 
Western Civilization’s feat of radiating its culture all round the globe 
had been anticipated by a likewise ubiquitous radiation of the Egyptiac 
culture, but also that the spread of this migratory Egyptiac culture fully 
accounted for the existence of all other civilizations known to History— 
which, on this showing, would not be entitled to rank as separate civiliza¬ 
tions at all, but would be described with greater accuracy as being merely 
so many versions of a single Civilization, to be written with a capital ‘C’, 
which had been brought to birth by a unique act of original creation in 
the Lower Nile Valley in the fourth millennium B.c. 

In any particular case of a similarity or an identity between two or 
more social situations presenting themselves at different positions in 
Space-Time, a cautiously empirical student of History will beware of 
committing himself to an a priori aetiology based on the demonstrably 
fallacious assumption that all such similarities or identities must be 
effects of some single exclusively operative cause; he will approach each 
presentation of this historical problem with an open mind on the ques¬ 
tion whether the case in point is an effect of the diffusion of culture or 

« In II. i. 299-338. 2 In II. i. 424-40. 



THE DIFFUSION OF CULTURE 489 

whether it is an effect of the uniformity of Human Nature. He will be 
prepared to find both these causes contributing to produce the result in 
varying proportions; and he will treat each case as an individual problem 
on its own merits. 

There are, for example, positive grounds for our suggestion that the 
Castilian avatar, in the New World, of a Carthaginian Empire in the Old 
World and the Hohenstaufcn avatar, astride the Alps, of an Arsacid 
Empire bestriding the Zagros are two cases of correspondences that are 
to be regarded as results of the diffusion of culture, and not as products 
of the uniformity of Human Nature. These grounds are that, in either 
case, the complex of culture-elements that is common to the histories of 
two different societies does not present itself in the same historical 
setting in its two separate appearances on the stage. 

The Carthaginian Empire was, as we have seen, a Libyphocnician re¬ 
sponse to an Hellenic challenge in a contest between Phoenicians, 
Hellenes, and Etruscans for the command of the Western Basin of the 
Mediterranean; and this maritime competition in the Mediterranean 
between three parties in the eighth, seventh, and sixth centuries B.c. has 
its recognizable historical counterpart in a similar struggle between the 
Crusaders, the East Romans, and the Muslims in the same natural 
‘naumachia’ in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries of the 
Christian Era. The Western Christian ‘thalassocracy’ in which we have 
seen an avatar of the Carthaginian ‘thalassocracy* does not, however, 
make its appearance either in the thirteenth century of the Christian 
Era or in the Mediterranean, where we should expect to find it appear¬ 
ing if its striking similarity to the Carthaginian ‘thalassocracy’ had been 
an effect of the uniformity of Human Nature producing an identical, 
though independent, response to a separate, but identical, challenge. 
The Castilian ‘thalassocracy’ presents itself as late as the turn of the 
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and as far away as the Basin of the 
Caribbean, on the farther side of the Atlantic; and in this different time 
and place the parts of the play are performed by a different cast of 
actors. The contest for the command of the Spanish Main was not a 
further round in the fight between the Crusaders, East Romans, and 
Muslims who had been competing for command of the Mediterranean 
in the Medieval Age of Western history ; it was a domestic brawl between 
divers members of the Western Christian family; and in the last act the 
Castilian monopoly of the New World succumbed to simultaneous but 
unconcerted attacks on the part of Dutch, English, and French buc¬ 
caneers—in contrast to the concentration of the naval strength of Magna 
Graecia under Roman hegemony which was required in order to break 
the Carthaginian monopoly of the Maghrib in the last act of a West 
Mediterranean drama in which both the stage and the cast were the 
same in the third century B.c. as they had been in the eighth. 

Thus the Carthaginian and Castilian ‘thalassocracics’ are analogous to 
one another in their institutional form without being analogous to one 
another in their historical roles; and their non-correspondence in point 
of roles suggests that their correspondence in point of form is unlikely to 
have been an outcome of the uniformity of Human Nature; for, though 



490 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION 
this uniformity can and docs generate uniform effects in eases between 
which there is no historical connexion, it produces this result by return¬ 
ing identical responses to challenges that, though separately delivered at 
mo different positions in Time-Space, are identical in character. We 
have just seen, however, that the challenges by which the Carthaginian 
and the Castilian ‘thalassocracy’ were evoked were not identical in 
character with one another. In this case, accordingly, the hypothesis of 
the diffusion of a culture-complex would seem to hold the held as the 
more convincing explanation for a similarity between two institutions 
occurring at different positions in Space-Time. 

The same explanation for the morphological correspondence between 
the Holy Roman Empire and the Parthian Empire commends itself for 
the same reason. In spite of their remarkable similarity in structure and 
ethos, these two politico-social dispensations played widely different 
roles in the respective histories of the Western and the Syriac Society. 
The Parthian Empire was a Syriac response to the violent challenge 
presented by the conquest of the Syriac World by Hellenic force of 
arms, whereas the Holy Roman Empire was a Western response to a 
peaceful challenge from an alien civilization which was not the sister, 
but was the parent, of Western Christendom. In attempting to recon¬ 
stitute the Carolingian Empire, Otto I was seeking to achieve a second 
rebirth of the Roman world-order with the object of saving the life of 
an adolescent civilization which was in less deadly danger from assaults 
at the hands of external enemies than from its own inconscionable bar¬ 
barism. On the other hand, in attempting to reconstitute the Achae- 
menian Empire, Mithradates I was seeking to re-establish a prematurely 
shattered Syriac universal state with the object of saving the life of a 
middle-aged civilization whose domain had been overrun by alien con¬ 
querors. The respective roles played by the Arsacid Empire and the 
Holy Roman Empire in Syriac and in Western history are in fact so 
widely different that, in this case again, the process of the diffusion of 
culture seems more likely than the operation of the uniformity of Human 
Nature to have been the cause of the striking morphological resemblance 
between these two regimes. 

On the other hand, uniformity rather than diffusion may best explain 
the similarity of the Hittite regime in Eastern Anatolia in the fourteenth 
and thirteenth centuries b.c. to the Arsacid regime east of the Euphrates 
in the last two centuries b.c. and the first two centuries of the Christian 
Era and to the Holy Roman Empire in Central Europe in the Medieval 
Age of Western history; for it seems highly improbable that the Arsacid 
dispensation’s unquestionable resemblance to the Hittite dispensation 
can have been the effect of a culture-wave travelling from a thirteenth- 
century Cappadocia to a second-century Khurasan. We have ample 
evidence concerning the radiation of culture in South-West Asia during 
the last two millennia b.c., and this evidence shows that the prevailing 
set of the cultural current throughout that period was, not from Cap¬ 
padocia to the Tigris-Euphrates Basin and Iran, but from the Tigris- 
Euphrates Basin and Iran to Cappadocia. The Sumerian and Akkadian 
languages and their cuneiform script, the Sumeric science of divination, 



THE DIFFUSION OF CULTURE 491 

the worship of Ishtar, the tale of Gilgamcsh , 1 the Assyrian style of art, 
the religion founded by Zarathustra, the Achaemenian feudal system , 2 
all travelled this royal road in this north-westward direction. The only 
counter-wave that we can catch in the act of travelling in the opposite 
direction—from the Hittite to the Babylonic World—is a style of 
domestic architecture which was borrowed in the seventh century B.c. 
from the Refugee Hittite communities in Northern Syria by the Assyrians 
under the name of bit-hilani (‘the house with windows ’). 3 

The introduction of the Hittite hieroglyphic script from Cappadocia 
into Syria is not another case in point; for, though the invention of a 
new script of this type in the second millennium B.C., as an alternative to 
taking over the Sumcric cuneiform script ready-made, had been a re¬ 
markable feat of creativity in its day, the syllabic phonetic as well as the 
ideographic technique of writing had been superseded in Syria by the 
Ugaritic and Phoenician alphabets by the time when the Refugee 
Hittites brought their hieroglyphic script into Syria with them from the 
north-western side of the Taurus; and there is no evidence that either 
this script or the Indo-European language 4 conveyed in it was adopted 
by any of the non-Hittite inhabitants of Syria in the last millennium 
B.C., while there is impressive evidence of the use of the Aramaean 
language and alphabet in the Refugee Hittite communities. 

On this showing, w'c shall be chary of trying to explain the corre¬ 
spondence between the Hittite Empire and the Arsacid and Holy Roman 
empires as an effect of the process of culture-diffusion, which is a 
possible explanation of the resemblance that the Arsacid and Holy 
Roman empires bear to one another; and, a fortiori, the similarity of 
fithos between ‘the New Empire’ that established itself in Egypt in the 
sixteenth century B.c. and the Ming regime that established itself in 
China in the fourteenth century of the Christian Era is to be explained 
as an outcome of independent identical responses to separate identical 
challenges, considering that there is no evidence and no likelihood of any 
direct culture-radiation from the Egyptiac World of the second millen¬ 
nium B.c. to the Far Eastern World of the second millennium of the 
Christian Era, while there is a manifest similarity between the challenges 
to which ‘the New Empire’ and the Ming Empire were responses. The 
Mongol conquerors who were expelled from Intramural China by the 
Ming resembled the Hyksos conquerors who were expelled from Lower 
Egypt by Amosis in being barbarians imbued with a tincture of an alien 
civilization; and it was this blend of Barbarism with an alien higher 
culture that aroused in the hearts of the barbarians’ cultivated victims 
the fanatically ‘Zealot’ temper which was the spirit of ‘the New Empire’ 
of Egypt and the Ming Empire alike . 5 

Another case in which culture-diffusion cannot be the explanation of 

» Sec I. i. ti2. * See VI. vii. 123-4- 

J See Delaporte, L.: let Hittites (Paris 1936, La Renaissance du Livre). p. 330. 

* The language conveyed in the Hittite hieroglyphic script had proved to be a third 
language of the Hittite family, distinct from, though closely akin to, both ‘the language of 
Nyssa’, which was the official language of Khatti, and the ‘Luvian’ language current in 
the mountainous hinterland of the Mediterranean seaboard of Anatolia. 

s On this point see V. v. 348-53- 



492 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION 
a far-reaching similarity between two social dispensations that lie far 
apart from one another in the Time-dimension is one in which the later 
embodiment of an identical dispensation occurred in situ in a physical 
environment whose features were so strongly marked and so static 
within the chronological limits of the whole period in question that in 
this case a local uniformity of Physical Nature co-operated with a general 
uniformity of Human Nature to evoke an identic, though independent, 
response to a separate, but identic, challenge. The common geographical 
field of these successive identic responses to an identic challenge from 
both the physical and the human environment was Continental Euro¬ 
pean Greece; the two periods in which the same drama was performed 
on the same stage ran respectively from the seventeenth to the twelfth 
century b.c. and from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century of the 
Christian Era; and in both these two periods of Continental European 
Greece’s history an identic sequence of events occurred. 

First the country was conquered by invaders from overseas who 
brought with them an exotic culture: Minoan invaders from Crete in the 
seventeenth century b.c. 1 and French and Venetian invaders from 
Western Christendom in the thirteenth century of the Christian Era. 
These invaders adapted their tactics to the physical structure of the in¬ 
vaded country by making artificial fortresses out of some of the natural 
fortresses in which the landscape abounded. The sites that they were apt 
to select among the almost innumerable sites at their disposal were those 
which commanded the rare cultivable plains or the rarer passes leading 
from one plain to another or, best of all, both a plain and a pass com¬ 
municating with the next plain in locations where Nature offered to a 
castle-builder with an eagle eye the possibility of making this economy 
of precious man-power. An Achaean Menelaion perched on the bluffs 
overhanging the River Eurotas opposite the site of the town of Sparta 
was as good a vantage point as a Frankish Mistri for commanding the 
vale of Hollow Lacedaemon which lay between these two castles; but 
Mistrk was a better-chosen site than the Menelaion because a garrison 
posted there could control not only the Sparta plain but also the Lace¬ 
daemonian mouth of the Langadha Pass that gave a passage from 
Lacedaemon into Messenia. In the Frankish Age William de Villc- 
hardouin’s castle at Mistra 2 had its complement in Geoffrey de Ville- 
hardouin’s castle at Kalamata commanding the Messenian mouth of 
the Langadha Pass as well as the southern bay of the Messenian plain, 
while in the Mycenaean Age an Achaean Menelaion and a Frankish 
Mistrk had their respective counterparts in the Argolid at Tiryns and 
Mycenae. 

A physical environment which thus made it easy for invaders to 
establish their control over the principal plains and passes also made it 
difficult for them to penetrate the surrounding wilderness of mountains, 
and in these encompassing highlands they found themselves compelled 

» See I. i. 94, with n. i. 

* William's personal choice of the site of Mistr* in a.d. 1248, and the subsequent 
building of the castle of Passuvant on his council's advice, arc recorded in The Chronicle 
of the Morea, 11 . 2985-3007, on pp. 200-1 of J. Schmitt's edition (London 1004, 
Methuen). 



THE DIFFUSION OF CULTURE 493 

to leave the native population unsubdued de facto . 1 The invaders had, 
in fact, to content themselves with the skeleton occupation of the 
country which they had achieved at the first stroke, 1 and they were not 
even left in undisturbed occupation of these restricted territorial 
acquisitions; for the very success of the original invaders’ feat of arms 
tempted other, still hardier, adventurers, following in their wake, to 
emulate their prowess by wresting their conquests from them. 

In the second millennium of the Christian Era the Burgundian 
French lords of a medieval Frankish Duchy of Athens were exterminated 
by Catalan interlopers, the Catalans were superseded by Florentines, 
the Florentines were ousted by 'Osmanlis; in the second millennium 


I While Mistrl controlled Hollow Lacedaemon and the pass leading from it to 
Kalomita in Messenia, Mistri and Passavant, between them, contained the unsubdued 
highlands of the Southern TaJ?getus, which, at the time of the Frankish conquest of 
the Morea, were occupied by a tribe of untamed Slav barbarians, the Mclingi. These 
Slav wild highlanders had managed to maintain their independence here after the East 
Roman Government's re-establishment of its authority over the rest of the Morea in the 
reign of the Emperor Basil I ( imperabat a.d. 866-8S6). It is noteworthy that the same 
highland fastness played the same role in at least two other passages of history. It was 
tenanted by the Albanian Muslim Varduniots from a.d. 1715, when the ‘Osmanlis re¬ 
conquered the Morea from the Venetians, until the Greek Christian uprising in the 
Morea in a.d. 1821 (see p. 494, below); and in the Archaic Age of Hellenic history it 
was tenanted by a band of Minyac—survivors from the cataclysm of a post-Minoan 
Vblkerwanderung—whom a rising city-state of Sparta found it difficult to reduce to 
submission (sec Herodotus, Book IV, chaps. 145-8). 

1 The conquerors' one chance of extending and consolidating their first hold lay in 
the possibility of obtaining reinforcements of their own kith and kin; and we happen to 
have indications that the Pelopid and the Champenois princes of the Morea alike felt a 
lively concern about this. 

In the Odyuiy (Book IV, 11. 171-7) Menelaus the Pelopid prince of Sparta is repre¬ 
sented as saying to the son of an Odysseus who had been Menclaus’s companion-in-arms 
on the Achaean expedition against Troy: 

‘I had it in mind, if your father had turned up, to bestow on him tokens of my affection 
beyond anything that I would have done for any other of the Argives—if only Zeus 
the all-sccing dweller on Olympus had granted the two of us a happy return across the 
salt sea in the swift ships. Why, I would have established a fort (vdcoa wo’Acv) for him 
here in Argos and have built a home here for him: I would have brought him from 
Ithaca with his property and his child and his war-band (n&oiv Aaotoi); 1 would have 
gutted for him one of the [native] forts in the [unsubdued] hinterland of jny own 
dominions (filav iro’Aiv t’faAairafat f al urpivacraoimv, cvaooovrai 6’ f/ioi aimo).’ 

This Homeric strophe has its nntistropne in The Chronicle oj the Morea (11. 1847-66, 
on pp. 1 f4~7 of J. Schmitt’s edition) in the account there of Prince William de Champ- 
litte’s investiture of Geoffrey de Villchardouin with the fief of KalamSta and Aikadhik 
as a reward for Geoffrey’s friendly act in parting company with his Frankish fellow 
conquerors of Constantinople and Salonica in order to throw in his lot with the Frankish 
adventurers in the Morea. After William has invested Geoffrey and duly received his 
homage in return, the prince addresses his new^ vassal (ibid., 11. 1870-2) as follows: 

‘Now that you hold your fief under my overlordship, it is meet and right that you 
should be my true liege in all things, and that I, for my part, should trust all my fortunes 
in your hands.’ 

An identical picture of the relations between a Morcot prince and his vassal is drawn 
by the Homeric Menelaus: 

'Had we been here together, how often we should have enjoyed one another’s com¬ 
pany! Nothing till the fall of Death’s black curtain would have parted us—nothing short 
of this would have stopped us showing, and enjoying, our mutual affection’ ( Odyssey , 
Book IV, II. 178-80). 

Menelaus was not called upon to say in what quarter of his principality s dissident hinter¬ 
land he would have planted Odysseus and his Cephallenians; but we know the approxi¬ 
mate limits of Geoffrey’s fief, and it is a curious coincidence that this medieval Frankish 
lordship should have been approximately co-extensivc with the territory held by a 
Nclcid Nestor and his Minyans, together with the seven forts that, in the Iliad (Book JX. 
11. 149-53), Agamemnon is represented as offering to bestow on Achilles as an induce¬ 
ment to tne offended leader of the Myrmidons to stop sulking when his hard-pressed 
companions-in-arms are in such sore need of his help. 



494 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION 

B.c. the Minoan lords of the Argolid were superseded by Achaeans, 
and the Achaeans by Pelopids who—if Modern Western Hittitology 
were to rehabilitate Hellenic legend—might prove to have made their 
way to the Morea from an Anatolian homeland in the neighbourhood of 
the cradle of the Ottoman Power. 1 While the castles built by the original 
invaders thus repeatedly changed hands, the feudal rdgime of which these 
castles were the physical embodiments persisted through these succes¬ 
sive changes of ownership; but a monotonously unedifying game of 
grab came at last to a catastrophic end in both performances of the play. 
In both cases the unsubdued native highlanders were gradually re¬ 
inforced by the infiltration of barbarians from the interior of the Balkan 
Peninsula, and in the last act the interloping feudal regime was success¬ 
fully assailed and overwhelmed by a resurgence of the indigenous popu¬ 
lation. In the Morea in a.d. 1821 the Ottoman Turkish Muslim cpigoni 
of the Villehardouins were exterminated by the united forces of native 
Moreot Orthodox Christian Greeks and immigrant Orthodox Christian 
Albanians who had seeped into the Morea since the fourteenth century; 2 
in the same arena at some date in the course of the twelfth century b.c. 
the Pelopid epigoni of the seventeenth-century Minoan invaders of the 
Argolid were overwhelmed by an avalanche of barbarians speaking the 
North-West dialect of the Ancient Greek language. 

This combination of correspondences between the history of Con¬ 
tinental European Greece in the second millennium b.c. and the history 
of the same country in the second millennium of the Christian Era is so 
remarkable that we may find ourselves wondering after all whether the 
Pelopids may not have emitted some wave of cultural radiation which 
the Villehardouins managed to pick up across a twenty-four-centurics- 
wide Time-interval; and the sheer length of this interval—redoubtable 
though it be when measured on the Time-scale of the histories of civiliza¬ 
tions—might not, perhaps, be an insuperable obstacle to the entertain¬ 
ment of this fantasy. The consideration that makes its entertainment 
impossible, and compels us in this case to explain the correspondences as 
effects of the uniformity of Physical and Human Nature, is the gigantic 
historical fact that this Time-interval of twenty-four centuries between 
the overthrow of the Pelopids and the arrival of the Villehardouins was 
occupied in Continental European Greece by the histories of the Hellenic 
Civilization and its Orthodox Christian successor. Both these interven¬ 
ing cultures used the enduring physical landscape of Continental 
European Greece for their own purposes; but these purposes were 
different from the common purpose of the feudal lords who dominated 
the same country both before and after. A landscape on which a feudal 
regime was founded by Achaean and Frankish castle-builders was 
utilized with equal success by the political architects of the Hellenic 
Civilization for the entirely different purpose of creating a galaxy of 
city-states. Between the pre-Hellenic and the post-Byzantine feudal 
rdgime in Continental European Greece there is a vitai pausa 3 that pre- 

* Sec p. 449, n. 2, above. 

1 Sec V. v. 293-4. 

J Lucretius: De Return Natura, Book III, I. 860. 



THE DIFFUSION OF CULTURE 495 

eludes all possibility of any historical connexion between these two 
identic feudal dispensations on the same site. 

This is perhaps as far as we can carry our investigation of the part 
played in human history by the process of culture-diffusion, and we may 
now’ go on to inquire into the divers conditions in which culture-rays are 
transmitted from one body social to another. 


(II) THE DIFFRACTION OF CULTURE 
Culture-Patterns and their Instability 

There arc alternative possible conditions in w’hich culture-rays may 
be transmitted because there are alternative possible states in which a 
culture may present itself, whether we happen to be observing it in 
process of radiation from one body social to another or in its birthplace 
in the bosom of the body social that is its source. The state of the radiat¬ 
ing body at any given moment, whichever of the alternative states this 
may be, will determine the state of the culture-rays that this body is 
emitting at the time. If the emitting body's state changes, the state of 
the rays emanating from it will change correspondingly. In fact, the 
texture of a culture-ray will always faithfully reproduce the fabric of the 
society that is its source, 1 unless and until the ray, in its passage through 
Space-Time, comes to be affected by another social force as a result of 
impinging upon a foreign body. 

The instability of the fabric of a culture is something intrinsic in the 
nature of Culture itself, for it arises from the fact that Human Life 
expresses and fulfils itself in a diversity of constituent activities; and 
this primordial plurality of Life cannot be reduced to unity by the 
crude procrustean operation of eliminating all these activities save one, 
since Humanity cannot renounce any of them without ceasing to be 
human. The unity of purpose and direction that is a necessary’ condition 
of spiritual health and is indeed the distinctive characteristic of a healthily 
growing human society is achieved, not by eliminating any of the in¬ 
dispensable elements of human culture, but by co-ordinating all these 
elements in a harmony such as is maintained by the various instruments 
in an orchestra w-hen the musicians are playing a symphony under the 
leadership of a conductor. 

‘What has happened in the great art-styles happens also in cultures as 
a whole. All the miscellaneous behaviour directed towards getting a living, 
mating, warring, and worshipping the gods is made over into consistent 
patterns in accordance with unconscious canons of choice that develop 
within the culture. Some cultures, like some periods of art, fail of such in¬ 
tegration, and about many others we know too little to understand the 
motives that actuate them. But cultures at every level of complexity, even 
the simplest, have achieved it. Such cultures are more or less successful 
attainments of integrated behaviour, and the marvel is that there can be 
so many of these possible configurations. 

1 This point has been noticed already in III. iii. 152 and V. v. 199. 

* Benedict, Ruth: Patterns of Culture (London 1935, Routledge), p. 48. 


496 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION 
This dictum of one of the leading Western anthropologists of the day 
was being borne out during the lifetime of the writer of this Study by 
the progress of the sociologists’ investigation into the ways of life of 
societies in process of civilization, side by side with the anthropologists’ 
work on societies of the primitive species. In both these two new pro¬ 
vinces which Modern Western Science had been carving out for itself 
in the realm of Human Affairs, 1 it was becoming clearer year by year 
that a society’s culture—whether, at the time of observation, the society 
happened to be stationary on the primitive level or in motion in the 
movement known as civilization 2 —was normally a unity in the sense 
that the normal relation between all the diverse emotions and ideas and 
institutions and aptitudes constituting its social stock-in-trade was a 
condition of interdependence. An inquirer who set out to follow up in 
the life of any society the relations of any indigenous culture-clement 
(as contrasted with an alien element acquired from abroad) would find 
these relations ramifying so widely that this single clement would prove 
to have links—and these sometimes in unexpected directions and of a 
surprising kind—with almost all the other elements in this particular 
culture-pattern. Such an analysis would reveal connexions between 
things which at first sight might appear to have nothing whatsoever to 
do with one another; and, if the course of History performed the 
equivalent of a laboratory experiment by removing or modifying any 
single feature in the pattern, this local change would show itself capable 
of producing a disturbance of the entire social structure, even though 
the feature in question might have appeared insignificant before the 
importance of its role in the whole organization had been vindicated by 
this practical test. 1 

This interdependence which is so characteristic a quality of a culture 
in its normal state is, of course, conspicuous when salient features of a 
culture-pattern arc taken as the illustrations of it. It could be illustrated 
strikingly, for example, by tracing the ramifications of the two master- 
institutions of the Western Civilization of the writer’s day: that Modern 
Western Democracy and Modern Western Industrialism* which had 
been the principal engines through whose potently reciprocating action 
an aggressive society had been producing its profoundly subversive 
effects upon the lives of its contemporaries. In order to understand the 
nature and genesis of these two imposing and formidable features of the 
Modern Western way of life, the student would have to make himself 
familiar with the w'holc history of the Western Civilization since the 
Dark Age, and this not merely in its political and economic aspects. 
He would not be able fully to comprehend the work of a Ford or a Singer 
without knowing something about the work of a Calvin and a Benedict 
and running a sensitive finger along the chain of historical development 

1 See XI. ix. 185-9. 

1 This contingent and therefore merely provisional definition of the difference be¬ 
tween a primitive society and a civilization, in terms of an observable difference in their 
respective attitudes towards life at the time of observation, has been offered in II. i. 

interdependence of the divers elements in a culture-pattern is illustrated by the 
effects of a successful assault upon the social life of the assaulted party (see pp. 530- 
63, below). 4 See IV. iv. 137-98, 




THE DIFFRACTION OF CULTURE 497 
that linked the at first sight mutually incongruous activities of these 
quaintly diverse personalities at different points far apart in Time-Space. 
Nor would he be able fully to comprehend Modern Western parliamen r 
tary government or political propaganda or ideology without knowing 
something about Western Christian monastic orders and papal congre¬ 
gations and theology. The truth is that every indigenous culture-clement 
in the life of a society arises within, and in relation to, the whole of that 
society’s social structure, and finds its own proper place and special 
function in the structure upon coining to maturity. 

This normal integration of the indispensable constituent activities of 
Human Life into one or other of the divers alternative possible culture- 
patterns—each oriented to some particular activity or complex of 
activities which gives the culture its distinctive character by playing the 
dominant part in the co-ordination of its life—is the explanation of that 
qualitative difference between one culture and another which is discern¬ 
ible in a review of the primitive societies and is conspicuous in a review 
of the civilizations. In a previous context 1 we have observed that in the 
histories of the civilizations a progressive qualitative differentiation is 
one of the characteristics of growth ; 2 but we have also found that growth 
is not an automatic process but is the hard-won reward of an effort that 
makes a continual and exacting demand on the growing individual’s or 
growing society’s will-power, since it has to be perpetually renewed in a 
series of responses to challenges in which a successful response to one 
challenge always evokes a fresh challenge, with the consequence that 
every solution of one problem brings with it the presentation of another. 1 
This means that the abiding efficacy of a culture-pattern can never be 
taken for granted with impunity; for a particular culture-pattern is the 
imprint of a solution of a particular human problem; and, if spiritual 

1 In III. iii. 377-90. 

* The choices through which a society acouircs its individual character may, of course, 
be negative as well as positive. In Hellenic history, for example, the aesthetic penchant 
that is the salient feature of the obverse face of the Hellenic culture has its negative 
counterpart on the reverse side in the Hellenic Society's neglect to turn to practical 
account the Alexandrian scientist Hero’s invention of the steam-engine—though im¬ 
provements in the means of communication might have been expected to be nt a pre¬ 
mium in a post-Alexandrir.e Hellenic World in which there had been a sudden vast 
increase in the material scale of Hellenic life as a result of the Macedonians’ conquest 
of the Achaemenian Empire. Even if the failure to apply Hero's invention in the in¬ 
ventor’s own generation could be explained as an effect of the political anarchy that was 
afflicting the Hellenic World in the third century B.c., it would still have to be explained 
why, after the political unification of the Mediterranean Basin under a Pax Rotnana, 
steam traction was never applied to the maritime transport of grain from Alexandria 
to Puteoli or to the overland transport of troops, officials, and mails over the network 
of imperial roads—considering that the maintenance of an indispensable Pax Rcmana 
depended on the efficiency of the imperial regime in providing facilities for long¬ 
distance traffic. 

It is eaually significant that the Far Eastern Society showed a similar indifference to 
the practical potentialities of the Far Eastern inventions of printing, gunpowder, and the 
manner’s compass—all of which were subsequently turned to such epoch-making prac¬ 
tical account, for both good and evil, by Western entrepreneuri who might never have 
succeeded in inventing for themselves these original creations of the Far Eastern genius. 

‘The fact that these inventions were never developed in China in the dynamic style 
which characterised their effect on the culture of the West ought to be recognised as 
proof that the genius of Chinese Civilisation chose not to develop in the channels which 
appeared obvious to the West, but sought by preference other media for the highest 

K ression of the powers of Man’ (Lattimore, Owen: Manchuria, Cradle of Conflict 
w York 1932, Macmillan), pp. 168-9). 1 See III. iii. 1x2-27. 



498 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION 
health is to be preserved and social growth is to be maintained, solution 
must follow solution as one problem gives rise to another. The impulse 
to perpetuate a traditional culture-pattern that has done good service to 
Society in its day can defeat its own purpose, as we have seen, 1 by pro¬ 
ducing cither an enormity or a revolution. A culture-pattern can be kept 
in being only by being continually adapted to meet the manifold require¬ 
ments of ever-changing circumstances; and the intrinsic difficulty of 
this indispensable task is so formidably great that it is not surprising to 
find that culture-patterns are precarious structures which arc perpetually 
in danger of breaking up. 

When a culture-pattern docs break up for one reason or another, the 
divers constituent activities that have been co-ordinated with one 
another so long as the pattern has lasted now fall apart and go their 
separate ways along respective lines of least resistance that at best pro¬ 
duce a spiritual chaos and, at worst, a spiritual discord which declares 
itself in the forms of schism in the Body Social 2 and schism in the Soul . 1 
In previous contexts 4 we have noticed in passing what the principal 
component elements of a culture are. At the present point in our Study 
it will be convenient to carry our analysis a stage farther. 

If we venture, at our peril, to illuminate an obscure subject of inquiry 
with the borrowed light of a simile, we may perhaps not inaptly liken an 
integrated culture to a flint that has been compacted by the age-long 
pressure of enormous forces, and the disintegration of a culture to the 
work of a demonic flint-knapper who is master of the knack of splitting 
one flake after another off the core of the stone on which he is exerting 
his uncanny sleight of hand. In the knapping of a culture the outermost 
and most easily detachable flake is the economic side of Human Life, 
which may be defined as the field in which Man exerts his power over 
Non-Human Nature. The next flake, and also the next most easy to 
detach, is the political side of Life, which may be defined as the field in 
which Man exerts his power over his fellow human beings. When these 
two superficial layers of Life have been split off, a cultural core remains; 
and this core may be defined, in terms of Life, as the heart of a culture 
where the Soul participates in God’s creative work by grappling with its 
first and last adversary the Self 5 —a more formidable adversary than 
either its human neighbour or its physical environment, because this 
domestic adversary is identical with the Soul against which it contends. 
The field of cultural action, in this narrower and stricter usage of the 
term, is not, of course, confined within the bounds of the Self, since 
Man is a social animal who cannot be himself without being at the same 
time in communion with other spirits . 6 In the cultural heart, as well as 
on the political surface, of Human Life, Man encounters not only his 
Creator but his fellow human beings; but his intercourse with his fellows 
on the cultural plane takes place on a moral level high above the canon- 


In IV. iv. 133-7. 
v. v. 376-568 


J See V. v. 376-568 and vi. 1-175. 

4 In III. iii. 151-2; IV. iv. 57; and V. v. 199-201. 


* Sec V. v. 35-376. 


5 'The essential strategies in the war of Good against Evil are conducted within the 
intimate interior of personalities’ (Butterfield, Herbert: Christianity and Hiitory (London 
1949, Bell), p. 91). * On this point, sec III. iii. 223-30. 



THE DIFFRACTION OF CULTURE 499 

floor of politics. On the cultural plane coercion is of no avail; for the 
only form of power that can here be employed with effect is the power of 
spiritual attraction through which one soul moves another by love and 
not by force. 1 

This essence of a culture which remains after the political and econo¬ 
mic integuments of the core have been flaked off proves, however, to be 
fissile in its turn in our satanic flint-knapper’s hands. By a supreme tour 
de force of his calamitous ‘know-how’ this mythical impersonation of 
Original Sin is able to disintegrate the very core of cultural life by 
splitting off from it successively a linguistic, an intellectual, and an 
artistic flake until the religious nucleus of the core is exposed. This 
religious quintessence of a culture is perhaps proof against disintegration, 
but it is not proof against stultification through being isolated from all 
the other activities of Life and thereby being inhibited from exercising 
the pervasive influence which Religion is able to exercise in a healthily 
integrated body social. 

The social and spiritual effects of the knapping of a linguistic flake 
from a cultural core have been noticed already in this Study in our 
survey of the careers of languages which have been set free to travel far 
and wide as lingue franche because they have been divorced from their 
original function of serving as mother tongues. 2 The knapping of an 
intellectual flake comprising the technological, scientific, and philoso¬ 
phical substance of a culture for which a lingua franca serves as a vehicle, 
but not comprehending the culture’s artistic flake or its religious quintes¬ 
sence, has likewise come to our notice by forcing itself upon our attention 
in two historic instances: the intellectual abstract of the Modern 
Western Christian culture that ran like wildfire round the globe, after it 
had been knapped off by Western Man’s own hands towards the close 
of the seventeenth century of the Christian Era, 3 and the intellectual 
abstract of the Hellenic culture that eventually captivated the Syriac 


t ‘If Christianity fights in the World it does not (when churches sre in their right 
mind) wage war on actual flesh and blood.... For this reason the historian... in the last 
resort. . . secs human history as a pilgrimage of all Mankind, and human achievement 
as a grand co-operative endeavour, in which whigs and tories complement one another, 
both equally necessary to the picture’ (Butterfield, op. cit., p. 91). 

2 See V. v. 483-527. 

3 See pp. 118-19 and 314, above, and 516-18, below. Assuredly it was no accident that 
a Western Christian culture which, in its integrity, had been violently rejected earlier in the 
seventeenth century by the Japanese, was eagerly accepted before the close of the same 
century by the Greek, Serb, and Russian Orthodox Christians in the secularized version 
of it that had been produced in the meantime ns a result of a Western reaction against 
the Western temper that had discharged itself in the Western Wars of Religion. It is also 
assuredly no accident that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Venetian 
university of Padua should have been the alma mater both of Modem Western pioneer 
men of science in the fields of medical end physiological research and of Venetian and 
Ottoman Greek Orthodox Christian pioneer Wcsternizers. The precocity of the Vene¬ 
tian regime in adopting a policy of religious toleration before this had yet become the 
general rule in the Western World made it possible in Padua at the turn of the sixteenth 
and seventeenth centuries for the Protestant Englishman William Hervey [Harvey] to 
carry out the research that resulted in his discovery of the circulation of the blood, and 
for the Orthodox Greeks Cyril Lotikaris and Alexander Mavrogordito to give themselves 
a Western university education. The intellectual impact of 1 lervey’a discovery on Mavro- 

E irdito’s mind has been noticed already in this Study on p. 163, n. 3, and p. 17*. «• 8. 

or the part played by the University of Padua in the seventeenth-century Western 
scientific revolution, sec Butterfield, Herbert: The Origins o] Modem Science, 1300- 
1800 (London 1949, Bell), pp. 41-44. 




500 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION 
World after it had been knapped off by Hellenic Man’s own hands in 
the post-Alcxandrine Age of Hellenic history. 1 The artistic flake is the 
most difficult of all to knap off from the religious nucleus of a culture’s 
core; for Art serves Religion, as Language serves Thought, by affording 
it a vehicle; and we have seen Hellenic Art renew its youth and recover 
its creativity by entering into the service of the MahSyana.* Yet even 
Art can be divorced from its religious source of inspiration at the price 
of lapsing into either a sordid vulgarity or a repulsive barbarism. 3 

In a twentieth-century Western World the secularization of both Art 
and Thought, which had been perpetrated progressively by Western 
hands in the course of a quarter of a millennium, had come to be taken 
so entirely for granted that the abnormality of this act of cultural self- 
mutilation was now hardly perceptible to any Western eyes that were 
not doubly enlightened by the gift of genius and by the experience of 
penalization. In that age of Western history a distinguished Negro 
American singer felt the thrill of making a surprising discovery when he 
came to realize that the primitive culture of his African ancestors, of 
which a musical echo had survived the shock of enslavement and trans¬ 
plantation to a New World, was spiritually akin to all the non-Western 
higher cultures, and to the pristine higher culture of the Western World 
itself, in virtue of its having preserved a spiritual integrity which a Late 
Modern Western secularized culture had deliberately abandoned. 

'Years ago, I would not have said—as I do now—that I am proud to be 
a Negro. I did not know that there was anything to be proud about. Since 
then I have made many discoveries. 

'They began when I was still a student. I came in contact with Russians 
at college. I heard them sing their native songs and was struck by their 
likeness to Negro music. What was wrong with our despised music if it 
was akin to the revered Russian ? Had we a value that had been passed 
by? Were the outcast Negroes, who were struggling to assimilate frag¬ 
ments of the unsympathetic cultures of the West, really akin to the great 
cultures of the East ? It was a fascinating thought. 

‘I began to make experiments. I found that I—a Negro—could sing 
Russian songs like a native. I, who had to make the greatest effort to 
master French and German, spoke Russian in six months with a perfect 
accent, and am now finding it almost as easy to master Chinese. I dis¬ 
covered that this was because the African languages—thought to be 
primitive because monosyllabic—had exactly the same basic structure as 
Chinese. I found that Chinese poems which cannot be rendered in Eng¬ 
lish would translate perfectly into African. I found the African way of 
thinking in symbols was also the way of the great Chinese thinkers. I found 
that scientists had been puzzled by the strange similarity between ancient 
African and Chinese art. I found that I, who lacked feeling for the Eng¬ 
lish language later than Shakespeare, met Pushkin, Dostoievsky, Tolstoi, 
Lao-tsze, and Confucius on common ground. I understood them. I found 
myself completely at home with their compatriots. 

'Now there is an important thought here. With the coming of the 
Renaissance something happened to Europe. Before then the art, the 

* See pp. 405-6, above. 

* See III. lii. 131 and 247, n. i, and V. v. 134-5 snd 482-3. 

* The portents of vulgarity and barbarism in Art have been noticed in V. v. 480-3. 



THE DIFFRACTION OF CULTURE 501 

literature, the music were akin to Asiatic cultures. With the Renaissance, 
Reason and Intellect were placed above Intuition and Feeling. The result 
has been a race which conquered Nature and now rules the World. But 
the art of that race has paid the price. As Science has advanced, the art 
standards of the West have steadily declined. Intellectualised art grows 
tenuous, sterile. 

‘This is a serious thought. To what end does the West rule the World 
if all art dies? Jesus, the Eastern, was right. “What shall it profit a man 
if he gain the whole World and lose his own soul ?” ’’ 

In this intuition of the malady which a Late Modern Western Society 
had inflicted on itself, Paul Robeson was putting his finger on the differ¬ 
ence between an integrated and a disintegrated culture, and he had 
perceived that the structural and the spiritual disintegration of culture 
are two aspects of a single process. Some of the phenomena of culture- 
disintegration within the bosom of a single society have been examined 
in this Study already ; 1 we have now to inquire how the difference be¬ 
tween the two diverse possible states of a culture affects the transmission 
of culture-rays from one body social to another, and here we have to 
distinguish between several different possible cultural situations in 
which an encounter between contemporaries may take place. Both 
parties to the encounter may be in a state of integration, or both in a state 
of disintegration, or one in the one state and the other in the other state, 
at the time when the encounter takes place, and we shall find that the 
difference between these several diverse sets of circumstances is apt to 
be reflected in a corresponding difference in the outcome in the different 
cases. We shall also find that, whatever may be the respective states of 
the two colliding cultures at the time when their encounter occurs, the 
collision itself is apt to produce a disruptive effect of its own on both 
the structure of the impinging culture-missile and the fabric of the 
smitten body social if this collision results, not in a repulse of the attack, 
but in a penetration of the assaulted party’s defences. 

The Conduciveness of Cultural Disintegration to Cultural Intercourse 

When the impinging culture is in a state of integration, and a fortiori 
when the state of the smitten body social is the same, the outcome of the 
collision is apt to be one or other of two opposite extremes. The imping¬ 
ing culture will either rebound from the surface of the smitten body 
without having succeeded in penetrating it at all, or it will penetrate it 
with such effect as to succeed in assimilating it. In the light of our simile 
of the flint, this extreme diversity of the two possible results can be seen 
to arise from a proportionately extreme variability in the temper and 
conduct of the party that is taking the initiative. This original agent in 
the encounter may deliver to his neighbour the unknapped flint that he 
holds in his hand either by hurling it at him as a missile or by offering 
it to him as a gift. If he employs his philosopher’s stone as an offensive 
weapon, its mass and weight may bruise his victim’s body or even crack 
his skull, but the very size of the unknapped flint and the roundness of 

1 Robeson, Paul, in The Daily Herald, 5th January, 1935, p. 8, cols. 5-6. 

* In V. v and vi. 



502 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION 
its contours in its pristine state make it unlikely that it will pierce the 
bone and lodge itself in the brain like David’s pebble; and the unlikeli¬ 
hood of this happening will be the greater if the assaulted body social’s 
fabric is also in an integrated state; for in this state it will present a com¬ 
pact and close-grained front capable of withstanding the impact even of 
a missile that has been artificially sharpened to a deadly point; and an 
assaulted body social that is clothed in this spiritual armour may prove 
in consequence to be sufficiently master of the situation to be able to 
reject any alien culture-element which it does not feel itself able to 
metabolize and assimilate. ‘No reception without metabolization’ is a 
healthily integrated society’s war-cry in answer to the challenge of a cul¬ 
tural assault; and it would be difficult to find an instance of the success¬ 
ful penetration of a healthily integrated society by an assailant on any 
terms that were not of the assaulted party’s own choosing. 

Even when it is sufficiently master of the situation arising from an 
encounter to dictate its own terms, an integrated civilization does not 
readily accept a culture-element from an alien civilization; and, on the 
rare occasions when it allows itself to be receptive, the source of the 
alien culture-element that it does then receive will be found to be a 
radioactive civilization that is already in disintegration more often than 
one that is still in the recipient’s own state of cultural integrity. This is, 
of course, what we should expect in the light of our observation that the 
state of a radioactive body social’s fabric is reproduced in the texture of 
the culture-rays emitted by it at the time ; 1 for this means that a ray 
emanating from an already disintegrated body social will have been 
decomposed before issuing from its source, and a fortiori before imping¬ 
ing on its target, so that the recipient will have found the preliminary 
task of splitting the impinging integral ray into its constituent elemental 
rays already performed for him, and will find the subsequent task of 
selection proportionately facilitated, whereas he will have to carry out 
both these successive tasks for himself if he is to give admittance to any 
culture-elements emanating from a radioactive society that is still in 
a state of integration and that is therefore still emitting its radiation in 
an integral form. 

As a classic example of the rare phenomenon of the transmission of 
a culture-clement from one integral body social to another, we may cite 
the reception of the special Calabrian variety of Eastern Orthodox 
Christian monasticism by Western Christendom at the turn of‘the 
tenth and eleventh centuries of the Christian Era , 2 when the model 
monastery established at Grottafcrrata by a Basilian Saint Nilus on an 
invitation from the Holy See became one of the sources of inspiration 
for an already active indigenous Western Cluniac movement towards a 
reform of the monastic life in the Western Christian World. A contem¬ 
porary second example of the same phenomenon is the reception at 
Venice of the Byzantine visual arts of architecture and mosaic in the 
building and decoration of Saint Mark’s—though in this case the meta¬ 
bolization and assimilation of the imported culture-elements was less 

* See p. 4Q5, above. 

* See IV. iv. 357 and 600. 



THE DIFFRACTION OF CULTURE 503 
thorough-going than the spiritual metamorphosis through which an 
inspiration from Calabria was taken to heart at Cluny. 

The local acclimatization of a Byzantine style of architecture in a 
Western cultural environment at Venice in the tenth and eleventh 
centuries dwindles, of course, into a mere curiosity of history by com¬ 
parison with the creation, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, of 
a new Western style that was at once distinctive and oecumenical when 
a traditional Western Romanesque architecture gave birth to a revolu¬ 
tionary ‘Gothic’ architecture sired by an Armenian school whose 
masterpieces had caught the imagination of Western Crusaders; and 
we may compare this effect of an alien inspiration on the history of 
architecture in Western Christendom with the effect produced on the 
history of the Hellenic art of sculpture in the round in the seventh and 
sixth centuries b.c. by the impact of an Egyptiac style on the imagination 
of Hellenic mercenary soldiers and commercial travellers in the Nile 
Valley. We must note, however, that, while, in our two last-cited 
examples, as in our two first, the recipient societies were both still in a 
state of integration at the time as far as we can see, the radioactive 
societies in these two last cases were neither of them likewise in the 
same state. In contrast to the Orthodox Christian Society at the time 
when a monastic and an architectural inspiration were accepted from it 
by a contemporary Western Christendom, the societies that had pro¬ 
duced the Armenian style of architecture and the Egyptiac style of 
sculpture were, both of them, not merely in course of disintegration, as, 
for instance, the Syriac and the Indie Society were at the time when 
elements derived from them were perhaps adopted, metabolized, and 
assimilated by a still integrated contemporary Hellenic Society which was 
creating ‘a fancy religion’ for itself in the shape of Orphism. 1 At the 
dates here in question, the Armenian and Egyptiac societies were both 
in a pathological after-state of petrifaction, and this was the condition 
in which they exerted their profound cultural influence on an integral 
Western Christian and an integral Hellenic Society respectively. The 
radioactive Armenian community was one fragment of a Monophysitc 
‘fossil’ of an already extinct Syriac Society; 2 the radioactive Egyptiac 
Society was a ‘Tithonus’. 1 

With this clue in our hands, we may now be able to discern the reason 
why the Absolute Monarchy that was the master-institution in the 
political life of Eastern Orthodox Christendom was first rejected, and 
afterwards accepted, by a Western Christian sister society. On these two 
occasions the institution in question was the same, and on both occasions 
Western Christendom was in the same state of integration. The differ¬ 
ence between the two situations, which may account for the difference 
between the two Western reactions to the impact of the same Byzantine 
culture-arrow, was a difference in the state of the radioactive Orthodox 
Christian Society on the first occasion and on the second. At the time 
when the Western World rejected the attempt of the Saxon 'Holy 
Roman Emperors’ Otto II and Otto III (imperabant a.d. 973-1002) to 
acclimatize the Byzantine absolute authoritarian state on Western soil, 

» See V. v. 84-87 and X. ix. 738-40- 2 See I. i. 35. » See VI. vii. 47 - 5 *- 



504 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION 

the Orthodox Christian Society was still in a state of integration in 
which the divers elements constituting its culture-pattern were so closely 
knit together that it would have been difficult for another society to 
accept any one of these alien Orthodox Christian culture-elements 
without exposing itself to the risk of seeing its own distinctive indigenous 
culture-pattern obliterated by the descent of a cultural avalanche which 
would be precipitated by the movement of a single boulder in a moraine 
where the boulders were bound all to stand or fall together. On the 
other hand, by the time when the Byzantine absolute authoritarian state 
was taken over by the Western architects of a Norman successor-state 
of the East Roman Empire in Apulia, Calabria, and Sicily in order to be 
transmitted through the agency of Frederick II Hohenstaufen to his 
immediate heirs, the parochial North Italian despots of the Late 
Medieval Age of Western history—and, in their version of it, to become 
the inspiration of the absolute monarchies of an Early Modern Western 
World'—the Orthodox Christian Society from which this now acceptable 
exotic institution was derived was already in a state of disintegration; 
and this meant that a culture-element which, in the same society’s 
antecedent state, had been inextricably interwoven with all the other 
constituent elements in an integrated culture-pattern was now an 
isolated piece of casual wreckage which could be picked up and appro¬ 
priated without its necessarily bringing in its train the other ship’s 
timbers to which this plank had been clamped before the blows of wind 
and wave had prised asunder what the shipwright’s art had joined 
together. 

These instances indicate that an integrated body social which comes 
under a bombardment of cultural radiation emanating from another 
society is apt to reject any element originating in this alien source which 
it is not able to take on its own terms; and this means that its resistance 
is likely to be particularly stubborn when the alien culture-ray that 
impinges on the assaulted body social’s close-grained fabric is not an 
elemental one but is an integral shaft which is demanding to be taken or 
left as a whole, without picking or choosing. 

There are, it is true, historic examples of the gracious spectacle of the 
voluntary reception of an integral culture that has been offered by 
a neighbour as a gift instead of being inflicted by an aggressor on a victim. 
In the growth-stage of the history of the Hellenic Civilization we can 
observe Hellenism being accepted by ci-devant primitive peoples on the 
expanding fringes of the Hellenic World of the day—Lydians and 
Phrygians in the hinterland of Continental Asiatic Greece; Aetolians and 
Epirots and Macedonians in the hinterland of Continental European 
Greece; and Sicels, Messapians, Calabrians, Apulians, and Latins in 
a new world west of the Straits of Otranto. Hellenism also achieved the 
miracle of winning the allegiance of representatives of a society of its 
own species. The Etruscan transmarine pioneers of the Hittite Civiliza¬ 
tion became converts to the Hellenic Civilization before the close of its 
pre-Alexandrine Age, while in the post-Alexandrine Age of Hellenic 
history the cradle of the Hittite Society in Eastern Anatolia was likewise 
* See VII. vii. 537-9 and X. ix. 97-103. 



THE DIFFRACTION OF CULTURE 


SOS 


gradually Hellenized in the course of six or seven centuries ending in the 
generation of the Cappadocian Fathers of the Eastern Orthodox Church. 
The bloodless triumphs of Hellenism over primitive peoples were 
emulated by Orthodox Christendom when it successively converted 
the Georgians, the Alans, the barbarian Slav intruders into the Balkan 
Peninsula, the Bulgars, and the Russians; and they were emulated by 
Western Christendom when it converted the Frankish barbarians in the 
fifth century of the Christian Era, the English in the sixth, the Frisians, 
Hessians, Bavarians, and Thuringians in the eighth , 1 and the Poles, 
Magyars, and Croats at the turn of the tenth and the eleventh. Western 
Christendom also won the allegiance of two societies of its own species; 
and, whatever may be our assessment of the roles respectively played by 
the physical force of coercion and by the spiritual force of attraction in 
a Latin Christendom’s capture of the Far Western Christendom of ‘the 
Celtic Fringe ’, 1 it is indisputable that the Scandinavian World was 
captivated by a process of entirely peaceful penetration . 1 

This list of voluntary conversions is not unimpressive as far as it goes ; 4 
but, if w'e are to see the historic examples of this social phenomenon in 
true proportion, we must remind ourselves of three considerations that 
take some of the light out of this at first sight rather idyllic picture. One 
of these second thoughts is that the number of known instances of this 
happy denouement of an encounter between contemporaries was very 
small by comparison with the total number of known instances of such 
encounters; another consideration is that a majority of the peoples 
known to have voluntarily adopted an alien culture in its integral form 
had been either primitives or barbarians in the penumbra of a civiliza¬ 
tion; and it has also to be noted that, in the rare cases in which the 
integral culture of a civilization had been adopted unreservedly by 
representatives of a society of its own species, these relatively highly 
cultivated converts all proved to have been in some abnormally weak 
position, of one kind or another, at the time when their conversion 
took place. 

The Etruscans, for example, were an overseas outpost of a continental 
society who had been cut off from the main body of their kith and kin by 
their Hellenic competitors’ feat of planting themselves astride all the 
maritime lines of communication between the west coast of Italy and the 
south coast of Anatolia; and the subsequent conversion of the Etruscans 
to Hellenism thus occurred in ‘geopolitical’ circumstances in which the 
converts’ only alternative to accepting Hellenism was to succumb to it. 
Moreover, by comparison with their Hellenic contemporaries, the 
Etruscans laboured from the outset under the handicap of being the 
children of a society which had been prematurely shattered by the blast 
of a post-Minoan Volkerwanderung. The crippling effect of this peculiar 


* Sec II. ii. 336. * See II. ii. 522-40. > See II. ii. 340-60. 

* It would be rash to attempt to extend it by including in it any of the case* of the 
reception of the Modem Western culture by contemporary non-Western societies; for 
none of these current encounters with the Modem West had yet worked itself out to its 
denouement at the time of writing, and therefore at that date it was impossible to be sure 
that even the most sensational apparent instance of successful Westernization would not 
prove in the event to have been delusively ephemeral. 



5 o6 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION 
calamity must be presumed to have played its part in moving the 
Etruscans to adopt an alien culture in place of their Hittite social heritage 
—unless we have the hardihood to commit ourselves to the paradoxical 
alternative recourse of writing off as a mere coincidence the remarkable 
fact that the continental survivors of a shattered Hittite Society appear, 
side by side with their transmarine colonists in Etruria, in the strildngly 
short muster role of representatives of civilizations that had voluntarily 
adopted an integral alien culture in its entirety. Indeed, in this list they 
appear twice over; for in another context 1 we have already observed that 
the Hellcnization of the Continental Refugee Hittites on the north-west 
flanks of Taurus and Antitaurus in the post-Alexandrine Age of Hellenic 
history had been anticipated by the progressive captivation of their 
fellow refugees on the south-eastern flanks of the same mountain 
fastnesses by the Syriac culture through the agency of the Aramaic 
language and alphabet. 2 

The crippling effect of the disaster by which the Hittite Society was 
overtaken at the turn of the thirteenth and twelfth centuries B.c. has 
a counterpart in the history of one branch of one of the two nascent 
civilizations that were successfully absorbed by an adolescent Latin 
Western Christendom. The Celtic Christians in Britain had had their 
spirit broken by an avalanche of pagan English barbarian invasion 
before they tardily and reluctantly accepted the Latin Christian culture 
in the act of acknowledging the ecclesiastical supremacy of the Roman 
See. On the other hand the Britons’ disheartening experience, which 
may have predisposed them to renounce their ambition to bring to 
flower a distinctive culture of their own, was not shared by Irish Celtic 
Christians who had divided the spoils of a derelict Roman province in 
Britain with the pagan barbarian English invaders from the Continent; 
and the prelude to the voluntary incorporation of a pagan Scandinavian 
World into the body social of a Latin Western Christendom was a fresh 
barbarian Volkcrwandcrung in which the Vikings took the offensive with 
such formidable effect that the victimized society which was eventually 
to captivate these assailants had first to fight for its existence with its 
back to the wall. 

This encounter between ‘the heroes of Asgard’ and ‘the Apostle at 
Rome’ would seem to be a clear case of the voluntary reception of an 
integral alien civilization by representatives of another society of the 
same species in circumstances in which the act of cultural conversion 
cannot be accounted for by any antecedent trauma in the converted 
society’s psychic history. But a unique event, however notable in itself, 
goes to prove the rule to which it is an exception rather than the rule of 
which it would remain the solitary instance if rules could ever be estab- 

• See pp. 445-6, above. 

1 The long-continuing cultural intercourse between Hittites and Aramaeans that 
eventually resulted in the reception of a Syriac culture by the Hittite communities south¬ 
east of Taurus and Antitaurus had begun as early as the fourteenth century b.c., when 
Northern Syria had been invaded simultaneously by the Hittites from the Anatolian 
Plateau and by the Aramaeans from the North Arabian Steppe; but the archaeological 
evidence for the Syriac culture’s establishment of its ascendancy over the Hittite culture 
in this region does not begin to present itself before the turn of the ninth and eighth 
centuries B.C. (see Cavaignac, E.: Lt Problimt Hittite (Paris 1936, Leroux), p. 166). 



THE DIFFRACTION OF CULTURE 507 
lished legitimately on the strength of a single exemplification. In the field 
of encounters between contemporaries in which both parties arc societies 
of the species that we have labelled ‘civilizations’, and even in the wider 
field in which the ‘agent’s’ role is played by a civilization and the ‘re¬ 
agent’s’ role by a primitive or semi-primitive society, an Orpheus capti¬ 
vating all fellow creatures within earshot by the enchanting harmony of 
his heavenly music 1 is a rare figure by comparison with a Charlemagne 
forcibly baptizing the captives of his bow and spear or an Awrangzib 
morally alienating intended victims who have proved more than a match 
for him on the battlefield. The rule at which we thus arrive inductively 
proves to be that normally an encounter between contemporaries is 
culturally sterile even when one party, and a fortiori when either party, 
is in a healthy state of cultural integration; and the historical evidence 
likewise bears out the converse ‘law’ that a state of cultural disintegration 
is favourable to cultural intercourse, 2 and most favourable of all when it 
is the state of both parties to the encounter and when on both sides it 
has gone to extremes. 3 

This will be found to have been the social setting of most of the 
encounters, surveyed in earlier chapters of this Part, 4 which have taken 
the dramatic form of action evoking reaction and thereby producing a 
peripeteia. In terms of our simile of the flint it is easy to see that, when 
the knapper has split the stone by striking off flakes from the core, and 
when he has chipped his flakes into slim sharp arrow heads, these tooled 
fragments will travel faster and farther, and will lodge themselves deeper 
in their target when shot from a bow, than the unsplit stone when hurled 
by hand. The radiation of a radioactive body social is, in fact, more apt 
to make an impression on an alien body on which it impinges if the emit¬ 
ting body is in disintegration than if it is still in its state of pristine 
integrity; and, if we may infer that successfully radioactive societies will 
be found to be already in disintegration as a rule, we shall have laid our 
finger on at least one of the reasons why the process of radiation-and- 
rcception is apt to work itself out piecemeal over a protracted Time-span; 
for in previous contexts 5 we have already noticed that the divers consti¬ 
tuent elements of a culture have different specific velocities, ranges, and 
penetrative powers when they are in process of transmission from an 
emitting to a receiving body social, and that each ‘arrow’ (if we think in 
terms of Palaeolithic technology) or each elemental ray (if we think in 
terms of Modern Western optics) will take its own natural course as soon 

* See IV. iv. 124-6 and 131-2, and V. v. 2:0-13 and 231. 

* We have already stumbled on this ‘law’ at an earlier point in this Study (in III. 
iii. 128-54), where we have been led to formulate it as an explanation of the empirically 
demonstrable fact that the increasing command over a human environment which is 
registered in the geographical expansion of a civilization at the expense of neighbouring 
societies proves, not only not to be n criterion of social growth, but to be, perhaps more 
often that not, a symptom of social disintegration. 

J In IV. iv. 1:5-19 we have already come to the conclusion that there is no known 
instance of a civilization’s breaking down and disintegrating in which the cause of the 
breakdown can be demonstrated to have been a blow struck by some other party and not 
some suicidal act on the part of the broken-down society- itself. If this conclusion holds 
good in cases in which the aggressor society has been a civilization, it applies a fortiori 
to cases in which the domain of a universal state has been overrun by transfrontier bar¬ 
barians—as we have observed in I. i. 58-60 and in Part VIII, painm. above. 

4 On pp. 106-453, above. » In III. iii. 152; IV. iv. 57; and V. v. 199-200. 



5 o8 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION 
as it has been released from its wedlock with the core in the unsplit 
stone or with the rest of the elemental rays in an integral ray of white 
light. 

Decomposition through Diffraction 

This piecemeal transmission of the constituent elements of a culture 
cannot, however, be explained solely as an effect of a previous structural 
disintegration of the radioactive body whose fabric, whatever its state 
may happen to be, is reproduced in the texture of its effluent culture- 
rays, nor again solely as an effect of the receiving body social’s being like¬ 
wise in a state of structural disintegration—and therefore being more 
readily susceptible to penetration by an intrusive alien culture—at the 
time when it is exposed to the radioactive culture’s impact. In the 
knapping of the flint or the diffraction of the ray of white light—which¬ 
ever of the two similes we may prefer to employ—there must also be 
some other cause at work; for, if a spontaneous antecedent disintegra¬ 
tion of the culture-pattern of one party or both parties to the encounter 
were the only possible cause of this phenomenon of knapping or diffrac¬ 
tion, it would be impossible to understand why a culture should not be 
transmitted integrally and instantaneously in cases, like that of the con¬ 
version of the Scandinavians to the Latin Christian culture, in which the 
culture-pattern of both the parties to the transaction was in an integral 
state at the time when the act of conversion took place. Both in this case, 
however, and in that of the conversion of the Etruscans to Hellenism— 
an episode in which the Hellenic party, at any rate, was still in a state of 
cultural integration, whatever may have been the state of the Etruscans 
at the time—we find that, as a matter of historical fact, the migratory 
culture was transmitted, as in other cases, piecemeal and not all at one 
delivery, with the consequence that, in these cases likewise, the process 
of transmission took an appreciable time to work itself out. We must 
conclude that, in such cases at any rate, some other cause must have 
been operative; and, if we can identify this other cause, we shall have to 
allow for the possibility that it may have played some part likewise in 
those other piecemeal and protracted transmissions of culture in which 
the disintegrated state of the culture-pattern of the two parties, or of 
one of them, is the explanation that first leaps to the eye. 

A further pursuit of our optical simile may help us to bring to light 
this latent other cause of the decomposition of culture in the course of its 
transmission. In the Physical Universe our occasional perception of the 
diverse elemental colours of the spectrum, which in white light arc 
fused together into so perfect a unity that they arc not only inextricable 
but arc indistinguishable, is not the effect of a decomposition of light 
that has taken place in the body of the Sun before the ray which we per¬ 
ceive in this decomposed state has left its solar source and has impinged 
on this planet. The reason why, in human visual experience, white 
light is the normal epiphany of light and the colour-gamut of the spec¬ 
trum is an exceptional spectacle is because the light that reaches us is in 
fact emitted from the Sun in rays that are originally integral. The colour- 
gamut of the spectrum becomes visible to us only when an integral shaft 



THE DIFFRACTION OF CULTURE 509 
of sunlight happens to strike a terrestrial target of a particular consistency 
—a shower of rain or a block of crystal—at a particular angle at which 
the ray is able to penetrate this particular material obstacle to its farther 
advance at the cost of being diffracted into its constituent elements by 
the resistance of the foreign body. The shock of the integral ray’s impact 
from this angle on a target of this texture shakes the precariously inte¬ 
grated bundle of elemental rays apart into a ‘spectrum’ that is so called 
because, in it, each primary colour is sorted out from all the rest, with 
the result that each of the constituents of the original ray of sunlight 
becomes visible in and by itself at the price of the effacement of the 
white light that had been the visual effect of the elemental rays’ now 
dissolved association. 

If we retransposc our perilously illuminating physical simile into 
human terms, we shall find no difficulty in seeing why, in the realm of 
human encounters, the phenomenon of culture-diffraction should be 
produced by the shock inflicted on a body social by the impact of an 
alien culture-ray. The intrusion of any alien cultural clement into the 
life of any society, in whatever state of life it may happen to be at the 
time, is manifestly a dangerously disruptive, and therefore a painfully 
harassing, experience for the reason that a state of integration is, as we 
have seen, the normal condition of a healthy cultural life, so that even a 
society which has already spontaneously fallen into disintegration, and 
has perhaps since travelled far along this road, before being smitten by 
the alien culture-ray’s impact, will shrink from exposing itself wantonly 
to this foreign complication of a domestic situation that has already got 
out of hand. In fact, an assaulted society will never welcome its assailant’s 
culture with open arms or promptly abandon its own indigenous social 
heritage wholesale in order to substitute for it the importunately obtru¬ 
sive alien culture-pattern all of a piece in an instantaneous act of deliber¬ 
ate self-transformation. The victim’s immediate impulse (though, as we 
shall see, 1 not always his last, as well as first, resort) will be to put up an 
anxiously obstinate resistance, fight a succession of rear-guard actions, 
and swallow the exotic potion that is being forced down his throat in a 
series of minimum doses, in the reluctant spirit of a child compelled to 
take nasty medicine. Nothing but a course of disagreeable and disillusion¬ 
ing experience will teach this recalcitrant patient—if he ever learns the 
lesson at all—that he has chosen the most unpleasant and most in¬ 
expedient way of responding to a challenge which he cannot elude. 

A classical example of this initial negative reaction of the victim of 
a cultural assault is the long-drawn-out first chapter in the Ottoman 
Turks’ response to the challenge of the turn in the tide of their perennial 
warfare with the Western World. As we have seen, 2 they allowed the 
best part of a century to pass without taking any drastic steps after they 
had been warned of their danger by their signally disastrous defeat in 
the Great Turco-Frankish War of a . d . 1682-99; and, when they were 
stung into action at last by the still more disastrous and much more 
humiliating experience of being defeated by a Westernizing Orthodox 
Christian Power in the Great Turco-Russian War of a . d . 1768-74, they 

* Onpp. 580-613, below. J On pp. 232-8, above. See also p. 557, n. 4, below. 



5 X 0 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION 
stultified their own efforts for the best part of another century and a half 
by clinging to the impracticable policy of attempting to adopt the 
Modern Western art of war without simultaneously accepting any of 
those non-military Modem Western institutions that were in fact the 
indispensable conditions of Modern Western military efficiency. It 
required a third shock—the military invasion of their Anatolian home¬ 
land by their own ci-devant ra'iyeh, the Morcot and Rumelian Greeks, in 
a.d. 1919—to induce the Turks at last to follow a leader who put it to 
them that their only chance of survival now lay in embracing the 
Modern Western Civilization with enthusiasm and remoulding their 
way of life to fit this alien culture-pattern without reservations. Atatvirk 
addressed his saving message to his countrymen with assurance and 
authority because he had taken the measure of a disintegrating society's 
defencelessness against cultural aggression. When the living target of 
culture-arrows has lost the natural armour constituted by a closely in¬ 
tegrated social fabric, its skin will offer an opening at every pore for an 
arrow-head to insert itself, and the naked body will find itself exposed to 
penetration on terms that will be of its assailant’s setting, and not of its 
own. 

In the first stage, however, of a disintegrating society's encounter with 
a radioactive alien culture the negative reaction of the eighteenth-century 
and nineteenth-century Ottoman Turkish conservatives seems to be the 
mle. As further illustrations of this prevalent initial attitude we may cite 
the reluctance notoriously shown by the statesmen of a Roman Common¬ 
wealth in a post-Hannibalic Age to make annexations of territory belong¬ 
ing to the domains of any of the Hellenic Civilization’s Oriental 
neighbours, though these domains were then lying at the mercy of a Roman 
Power which had succeeded in overthrowing its sole really formidable 
competitor. A fortiori, these post-Hannibalic Roman statesmen were 
chary of bringing those alien worlds within Rome’s own walls by opening 
her gates to the importation, manumission, and enfranchisement of 
Oriental slaves, and they were particularly vigilant to repress or, as a pis 
alter, to sterilize, any immigrant Oriental religions, or at all events never 
to license them without having first done their best to denature them by 
insisting that they should not present themselves for admission till they 
had clothed themselves in an Hellenic wedding-garment. 1 

A Hittite worship of Cybele, an Egyptiac worship of Isis, an Iranian 
Syriac Mithraism, and a Palestinian Syriac Christianity all duly com¬ 
mended themselves to the main body of the Hellenic Society within the 
frontiers of the Roman Empire by assuming in their outward show the 
appealingly familiar style of Hellenic visual art, and even the Far 
Eastern outposts of Hellenism in Bactria and India that had been isolated 
by the rise of an intervening Arsacid Power and had fallen under Kushan 
rule were prospective converts of sufficient importance to make it worth 
while for an Indie Mah 5 y 5 na to resort to the same device of visual 
Hellenization in order to catch the eye of an Hellenic diaspord. West of 
Euphrates the Syriac missionary religion Christianity and the Babylonic 
missionary religion Astrology carried the propitiatory process of self- 
1 Matt. xxii. xi-14. 



THE DIFFRACTION OF CULTURE 511 

Hellenization a stage farther by translating their ideas and ideals into 
terms of Hellenic science and philosophy 1 instead of being content 
merely to lay a veneer of Hellenism over their visual surface; and it is 
significant that, in the competition between Oriental religions for the 
conversion of the main body of the Hellenic World in the Imperial 
Age, the victory should eventually have been won by the competitor 
that had gone to the greatest lengths in Hcllenizing itself and thereby 
turning the flank of the resistance which even a disintegrating Hellenic 
Society was still prone to offer to the reception of any alien culture- 
element that was conspicuously exotic. 

Without seeking to anticipate the eventual answer to the enigmatic 
question whether, at the time of writing, the Western Civilization was 
already in disintegration or was still in course of growth, we may cite, as 
evidence relevant to our present inquiry, the unquestionable fact that 
in the Late Modern and the Early post-Modern Age of Western history 
a Roman reluctance to incorporate culturally alien territories or to open 
the gates to immigrant alien bodies or ideas had been displayed by the 
governments of two Western Great Powers. 

The Hapsburg Monarchy was actually led to make the great refusal 
of its manifest destiny, and thereby condemn itself to an eventual catas¬ 
trophic liquidation, by its reluctance to add to the numbers of the ex- 
Ottoman Orthodox Christians under Hapsburg rule when once the 
Roman Church had reached the limits of its power to transmute 
Eastern Orthodox Christians into Roman Catholics through the alchemy 
of the statesmanlike institution of uniate churches. Just two hundred 
years before the dissolution of the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy in 
a.d. 1918, it had looked, on the morrow of the peace-settlement of 
Passarowitz, as if the whole of the Rumeliot main body of Ottoman 
Orthodox Christendom were on the point of passing under Hapsburg 
rule; yet Viennese statesmanship acquiesced in a.d. 1739 in the retro¬ 
cession to Turkey of the Serbian and Wallachian portions of the Otto¬ 
man territory acquired by the Monarchy in a . d . 1718; it let slip its 
opportunity of retrieving this loss in a.d. 1788-91 ; 2 and thereafter at the 
eleventh hour, when a Hapsburg Monarchy that had suffered humiliat¬ 
ing defeats at Serb as well as Russian hands in the opening phase of the 
General War of a.d. 1914-18 was taken up for an unearned and unsoli¬ 
cited ride in the cab of a momentarily victorious Hohenzollern ally’s 
triumphal steam-roller, the governments at Vienna and Budapest were 
gravely embarrassed by the ironical brilliance of a temporary political 
situation in which the disposal of Montenegro, Serbia, and Rumania 
momentarily lay in the hands of the Central Powers. To leave these 
conquered ex-Ottoman Orthodox Christian enemy states independent 
would mean stultifying the conqueror’s victory by leaving in existence 
so many transfrontier bases of operations for a resumption of pre-war 
irredentist nationalist movements among the Hapsburg Monarchy’s 
own Jugoslav and Rumanian subjects. On the other hand, to annex the 
conquered territories would mean undermining the political hegemony 
of a German and a Magyar ‘ascendancy’ in what might prove to be 
« See V. v. 367 and 539, and VII. vii. 470-6. J See II. ii. 180. 



512 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION 
a more dangerous way by changing the Monarchy's internal balance of 
national forces to the subject nationalities’ advantage. During the years 
a.d. 1915-18 Austro-Hungarian statesmanship was tormented by the 
nightmare of this insoluble problem till it was put out of its agony by 
the merciful hand of Death. 

The General War of a . d . 1914-18, which precipitated the dissolution 
of the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy, brought the United States face 
to face with the problem that had eventually defeated Hapsburg states¬ 
manship. 

During the hundred years ending in a.d. 1914 an ever more rapidly 
mounting flood of immigration from the Old World had provided the 
American people with the copious reinforcements of its man-power 
that were required for the achievement of its titanic enterprise of 
mastering a virgin island of almost continental dimensions; but the 
blithely indiscriminate welcome that had been given to this inflow of 
immigration into North America during the first chapter of the story 
had begun to be qualified by some disquiet in American hearts, and 
consequent reservation in American minds, when, at about the turn of 
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the composition of the inpouring 
stream had rather suddenly changed and had at the same time given 
premonitory indications of further, still more radical, changes that 
might be expected at no distant future date if the flood-waters w-cre not 
promptly brought under rigorous governmental control. The first spate 
of nineteenth-century immigrants had come for the most part from those 
North-West European countries whose colonists had peopled the 
Atlantic seaboard of North America before its attainment of political 
independence; but in the years a.d. 1880-93 a tributary stream had 
begun to flow from Italy, the Hapsburg Monarchy, and the Russian 
Empire, and in the years a.d. 1898-1914, in which the total volume of 
immigration was at its maximum, this parvenu and outlandish South and 
East European contingent greatly outnumbered the dwindling rear-guard 
of a familiar and acceptable North-West European column of route. 1 

The distinctive difference between these two diverse streams of latter- 
day immigration that moved the American people to adopt a discrimina¬ 
tory attitude was not, of course, the mere difference in their geographical 
provenance, but was the difference in their cultural complexion which 
this difference of provenance implied. A significant negative common 
characteristic of all units in the new contingent was the non-Western 
origin of their native cultural traditions ;* and this pacific invasion of the 

x See Toynbee, A. J.: Survey of International Affairs, 1924 (London 1926, Milford), 
pp. 8S-89. 

1 Within the boundaries of all the three states in the Old World from which the bulk 
of this new contingent of immigrants into the United States was drawn there were, of 
course, populations that were Western in their culture; but the majority even of these 
were representatives of the Roman Catholic branch of the Western Christian family, 
and not of the Protestant branch that had been predominant in the United States so 
far, and a majority of the Italian Roman Catholic immigrants in those years were 
Neapolitans and Sicilians, who still remained crypto-Byzantines even after a nine 
hundred years’ experience of on association with Western Christendom into which they 
had been conscripted originally by a Norman military conquest. The immigrants from 
the Danubian Hapsburg and the Russian Empire included undisguised Byzantines, as 
well as Jews. 





THE DIFFRACTION OF CULTURE 513 

United States by non-Westem immigrants whose exotic character was 
partially concealed under the misleading meaningless label ‘European’ 
was already threatening to attract reinforcements from other regions of 
the Old World whose inhabitants’ ‘un-American way of life’ was adver¬ 
tised by an arbitrary convention that labelled these other non-Western 
peoples 'Asiatics’. 1 

This new threat which the old institution of immigration had thus 
come to present to the integrity of the American people’s native Western 
way of life led the United States to follow up the enactment of a Chinese 
Exclusion Law on the 6th May, 1882, 2 and the establishment of an 
‘Asiatic Barred Zone’ in an act of the 5th February, 1917, 3 by passing 
the two momentous general Immigration Restriction Acts that came 
into force respectively on the 3rd June, 1921, and on the rst July, 1924. 4 
The Act of 1924 was designed not merely to restrict the total number of 
immigrants but to discriminate, within this total, in favour of applicants 
from North-West European countries. 5 The annual quotas assigned to 
countries from which a restricted flow of immigration was still permitted 
were governed by a formula that would tell against applicants of South 
and East European provenance; the immigration of Orientals was 
banned altogether; 6 and the Senate at Washington insisted 7 on confirm¬ 
ing the application of this Oriental Exclusion Clause in the Immigration 
Act of a.d. 1924 to applicants from Japan, in lieu of ‘the Gentleman’s 
Agreement’ that had governed the entry of Japanese nationals into the 
United States since a.d. 1907. 5 

By the year a.d. 1952 6 —by when it had become manifest in retrospect 
that this change in United States immigration policy after the First 
World War had played an appreciable part in the genesis of the Second 
—the American people had succeeded at this price in checking the 
cultural adulteration with which their body social had been threatened 
through an influx of culturally alien immigrants, only to discover, like 
the Romans before them, that the relatively easy recourse of physically 
excluding alien bodies left them still face to face with the more baffling 
problem of contending with alien ‘dangerous’ thoughts that had a knack 
of making their way through the most efficiently drawn official ‘sanitary 
cordon’ without requiring the services of any physical carrier. 'The 
wind blowcth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof but 
canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth.’ 10 If the twentieth- 
century American policy of excluding, restricting, and ‘screening’ 
would-be immigrants, and re-educating and assimilating the applicants 
who had qualified for admission, was a counterpart of the post-Hanni- 
balic Roman policy of regulating the importation and manumission of 

1 The unreality of the conventional partition of the Old World into a ‘Europe 1 and 
an ‘Asia’ is exposed on pp. 708-29, below. 

* Sec Toynbee, op. cit., p. 131. * See ibid., p. 90, n. 1. 

* See ibid., pp. 93-97. 5 See ibid., pp. 97-99- 

6 See ibid., p. 147- 7 See ibid., pp. i4$-59- 

8 See ibid., pp. 135-8. 

« The quota system introduced in the Act of a.d. 1924 was retained, while the dis¬ 
crimination on racial grounds, embodied in legislation hitherto in force, was abandoned 
in form, but not in substance, in the McCarran-Waltcr Immigrati~n Act, which was 
passed in the Senate at Washington, by a vote overriding President Truman’s veto, on 
the 27th June, 1952. 10 John iii. 8. 


B 2898. vW 


S 



5i4 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION 
slaves and confining the social and political enfranchisement of frccd- 
men within limitations, the Psyche’s task of resisting the propagation of 
Oriental religions, which defeated Roman statesmanship in a five- 
hundred-years-long 'cold war' of attrition, 1 had its counterpart in a 
spiritual conflict between 'the American way of life’ and the Russified 
ci-devant Western heresy of Communism which, on the morrow of a 
Second World War, was being waged in the bosom of the United States. 
The non-military hostilities on this American home front in the rear of 
the Bureau of Immigration’s elaborately fortified limes were even show¬ 
ing signs of taking forms that were familiar in the corresponding passages 
of spiritual arms in the Imperial Age of Hellenic history. 

The initial negative reaction on the victim’s part which we have been 
observing in these American, Austro-Hungarian, Roman, and Ottoman 
instances of it explains why an impinging alien culture is always 
diffracted in the process of reception and is never swallowed whole at 
one gulp even in those rare encounters between two integral cultures in 
which the process finds its smoothest and quickest passage; and the 
assaulted party’s defensive posture suggests another reason why, when 
the divers elemental rays have thus been shaken loose from one another, 
they prove, as they go their separate ways thenceforward, to have 
different speeds, ranges, and penetrative powers. Their difference in 
degree of prowess in these various respects is not due exclusively to a 
specific difference in their intrinsic carrying-power; it is also to some 
extent proportional to the difference in the degree of the resistance that 
each of them evokes in the psyche of the party that is their unwilling 
target. 

Inverse Selection through Transmission 

This further insight into the cause of the manifest differentiation in 
the elemental culture-rays’ carrying power enables us, at the next step, 
to detect the cause of one of the ‘laws’ governing the process of cultural 
radiation-and-rcception which we have already seen at work. This ‘law’ 
runs to the effect that the carrying-power of a culture-element is pro¬ 
portional to the degree of its triviality and superficiality in the spiritual 
hierarchy of cultural values. 1 It is a sinister law because it means that 
a culture, when it goes into disintegration, has to pay for an enhancement 
of the vigour of its radioactivity by reconciling itself to a deterioration 
in the quality of the elements that it is transmitting. We may put the 

E oint in terms of a homely simile by saying that the same amount of 
utter is spread wider by the simple expedient of being spread thinner, 
and by reminding ourselves that skim milk is more digestible than cream 
for a rice-fed Cantonese or Japanese child that is being introduced for 
the first time in its life to a novel diet of dairy-produce. 

While the unwilling victim of cultural aggression will diffract an 
impinging shaft of cultural radiation by repelling as many of its con- 

1 The opening date of this Romano-Oriental ‘cold war’ may be found in the Senate’s 
persecution of the Bacchants in t86 B.C., and its closing date in Galerius’a abandonment, 
in A.D. 311, of the Diocletianic persecution of the Christians (sec II. ii. 2x5-16). 

* See V. v. 200. 





THE DIFFRACTION OF CULTURE 515 

stituent elemental raj's as he finds it possible to repel in the first round 
of the encounter, the elements that he will be least reluctant to admit, 
if a total rejection of the aggressive alien culture proves to be beyond 
his power, will be those elements that seem to him the least difficult or 
least undesirable to assimilate; 1 and, when he finds himself driven to 
give admittance to partially intractable elements under the pressure of 
sheer force majeure for the sake of self-preservation—as, for instance, 
when he has to face the necessity of mastering in some measure a 
militarily superior assailant’s art of war—he will try to confine his 
reception of these more or less intractable elements to a minimum. 1 For 
this reason the process of culture-diffusion not only produces the 
phenomenon of culture-diffraction but also differentiates between the 
divers elements in the culture-spectrum of a diffracted culture-ray by 
selecting for the speediest and farthest transmission those elements that 
are of the lowest cultural value—a perverse operation of the principle 
of natural selection that awards a premium of efficacy to spiritual 
cheapness. 

We have already observed 3 that, as soon as the divers constituent 
elemental rays, or constituent flakes and core, of an impinging culture 
have been released from their pristine association with one another, the 
latent intrinsic difference between their respective carrying-powers 
comes into play—whether the cause of their disentanglement happens 
to be their impact on a diffracting target or happens to be the antecedent 
disintegration of the culture-pattern of the radioactive body social from 
which they have emanated. In this situation, in whatever way it may 
have arisen, the economic elemental ray or arrow manifests the highest 
carrying-power, the political arrow the next highest, and the untooled 
residual core of the impinging culture the lowest carrying-power of all. 
When this culture-core is split up in its turn by the successive dctach- 


* The operation of this ‘law’ is, of course, most conspicuously manifest on the econo¬ 
mic plane. Materials that have a world-wide currency as objects of value—c.g. jewels, 
gold, amber, jade, ivory, purple dye, spices, silk—may become objects of trade in the 
commerce between one society and another without carrying with them any infection 
of cultural influence or indeed any awareness of their original provenance (the lotus 
classic us for this culturally uncompromising form of commerce is the account of the 
transit of offerings from the land of 'the H>perboraeans’ to the Island of Delos, given 
by Herodotus in Book IV, chap. 33); and even treasures in the shape of works of art 
or specie may pas* physically from hand to hand without any concomitant transmission 
of the culture displayed in the image and superscription on a coin or in the modelling 
and decoration of a vase. Perhaps the most non-conductive of all treasures are pieces of 
loot such as the emerald table which was taken by the Umayyad conquerors of the 
Iberian Peninsula from Visigoths who, in their day, had token it from a pillaged Rome 
(see Gibbon, E.: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, chap, xxxi), 
or the seven-branched golden candlestick which was first carried off from the Temple 
of Jerusalem to Rome to figure in Titus’s triumphal procession and to be portrayed on 
a bas-relief on his commemorative arch, and was then carried off from Rome to Car¬ 
thage when Rome was sacked by the Vandals in a.d. 455 (Gibbon, op. cit., chap, xxxvi). 
Valuable materials and precious objects are received from alien hands with less reluc¬ 
tance than weapons, weapons less reluctantly than non-lcthal tools, treasures and tools 
less reluctantly than staple commodities, and commodities of all kinds less reluctantly 
than economic services—which are manifestly more compromising than material goods 
because, unlike these, they cannot be accepted by one society from another without 
personal contact with the alien hands by which they are being furnished. 

2 When this negative reaction takes the form of hiring alien mercenary soldiers in 
preference to educating a native personnel in an alien military technique, the attempt 
to keep an alien culture at arm’s length is apt to defeat itself (see pp. 730-2, below). 

s In III. iii. 152; IV. iv. 57; and V. v. 200. 



516 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION 
ment of linguistic, intellectual, and artistic flakes from the core’s religious 
nucleus, the respective intrinsic carrying-powers of these three cultural 
flakes prove to be different likewise; and here again the premium on 
spiritual cheapness prevails. The linguistic flake displays a higher 
carrying-power than the intellectual, and the intellectual than the 
artistic, while the religious nucleus of the culture-core has a lower 
carrying-power than the detached cultural arrowheads. 

This ‘law’ to the effect that the carrying-power of a culture-element 
is in inverse ratio to its spiritual value has a corollary, propounded in an 
earlier context, 1 which reads that the carrying-power of an integral 
culture-ray or unsplit philosopher’s stone is equal to the average of the 
respective intrinsic carrying-powers of its constituent elements. While 
the political, as well as the economic, arrow in isolation proves to have 
a higher carrying-power than the integral flint before the flakes have 
been split off, the residual core displays a lower intrinsic carrying-power 
in isolation than it enjoys when the more expeditious flakes arc still 
attached to it. In virtue of the same law, the carrying-power of the 
isolated religious nucleus of the culture-core proves to be lower than 
that of the total core when still unsplit, while on the other hand the 
carrying-powers of the artistic, intellectual, and linguistic flakes prove all 
to be higher in isolation than the carrying-power of the core before these 
superficial components have been detached from the religious nucleus. 

Our ‘law’ and its corollary could both be illustrated from the history 
of the radiation of the Western culture in the Modern Age. 1 In the 
writer’s generation the diffusion of this Western culture on the political 
as well as on the economic plane was already virtually world-wide, 
whereas on the cultural plane its influence beyond the borders of its 
homeland in the Western World itself was then still exotic and super¬ 
ficial, though by that date it had been radioactive for not less than four 
and a half centuries. 1 Moreover, the form in which this Modern Western 
culture—as distinct from Western economic and political technique— 
had won its world-wide ascendancy, such as it was, had been a utili¬ 
tarian secular abstract consisting of a linguistic and an intellectual flake 
which had served as ammunition for a Western Hercules’ bow after 
having been detached from the religious nucleus and from a still un¬ 
detached artistic flake of an integral Western Christian culture’s core. 4 

It was in this superficial form of a parcel of techniques, lingue franche, 
and sciences that the Western culture had been adopted towards the end 
of the seventeenth century of the Christian Era by Peter the Great in 
Russia after it had been rejected in its integral unsccularized form at the 
turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Hideyoshi and Ieyasu 
in Japan; and its subsequent rejection in China likewise in the very 
generation in which it was being adopted in Russia was a consequence 
of the disastrous success achieved by the Franciscan missionaries of 
a Tridentine Roman Catholic Christianity in China in foiling their 
broader-minded and farther-sighted Jesuit colleagues’ attempt to avert 

1 In V. v. aoo. * See xi, map 66. 

3 This point has been noticed already in I. i. 30-31. See also Halccki, O.: The Limits 
and Divisions of European History (London 1950, Sheed and Ward), p. 60. 

4 See pp. 3 14 and 499-500, above. 



THE DIFFRACTION OF CULTURE 517 
in China the fate which had already cut short the propagation of an 
integral Western Christian culture in Japan; for the Jesuit missionaries’ 
policy in China had been to offer this integral Christian form of the 
Western way of life to Chinese minds and hearts in the most anodyne 
version that could be devised by Christian representatives of the Modern 
Western Civilization who were not prepared to follow their agnostic 
contemporaries’ lead so far as to take the plunge into the unfathomably 
deep waters of secularization. 1 

The utilitarian secular abstract of the Modern Western culture which 
did succeed in captivating eventually to some degree not only the 
Russian, Serb, and Greek Orthodox Christians but also most of the rest 
of Mankind, including the Japanese and Chinese themselves in the 
next round of their continuing encounter with the West, 1 had found 
a readier market abroad in a smoothly ‘processed’ French decoction 
than in its racier but rougher English rawness; 1 and it had made its 
way farthest, by the time of writing, not at the esoteric depth of its 
revolutionary intellectual reinterpretation of the nature of the Physical 
Universe, nor even at the less abstruse level to which the gospel of 

1 This defeat of the Jesuit missionaries in China has been noticed in V. v. 365—7 
and 539, and V. vL *3-24. 

* In the mental vision of the writer of this Study the city of Shanghai stood, ever 
since he had first set eyes on it in a.d. 1929, as the concrete symbol of the soullessncss of 
this repulsively deconsecrated form in which the Western Civilization had made its 
latter-day conquest of the non-Wcstern World. In this product of Western commerce 
on Far Eastern ground a horrified Western observer could see a sight which was not to 
be seen at the time on Western ground in either hemisphere. Here was a great city, 
conjured up by Western enterprise and constructed and administered in the post- 
Modem Western style, which was charged with all the dynamic material energy that 
was coursing through the veins of a contemporary Chicago or Berlin or London or 
Paris, without at the same time trailing even one wisp of the cloud of pristine Western 
Christian spiritual glory that made the contemporary spiritual atmosphere of these 
American and European Western cities still just possible for a human soul to breathe. 

> See III. iii. 369-71. This 'processing’ role that was played by France in the Late 
Modem Age of Western history from the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen¬ 
turies onwards is depicted with an admirable sureness of touch in the following passage 
from the pen of a twentieth-century French historian:— 

'Puisque nous ne pouvons nous retenir, cn suivant le cheminement dcs idees, de nous 
imcrveiller quclcjuefois de leurs routes impr^vucs, Atonnons-nous encore de la prompti¬ 
tude, de la facility avec laquellc la France acceptc le r 61 e que les circonstances lui 
imposent. Cette puissance qui parait au nord, et qui menace son hrfgrfmonie, non seule- 
ment ellc 1’accepte, mais clle la sort. A sa propre activiti crfatrice, elle ajoute une activity 
nouvclle: clle va introduire les valeurs nordiques sur les marches latins. Empressde, 
elle jouera le rfile d’introductrice de la pensie bntannique aupris de sa clicntile italienne, 
espagnole, portugaiae. Quelquefoismfme, ellcs’intcrposeracntre lenord etlenord.de telle 
sorte qu'unc rtuvre venue de Londres passera par Paris avant d’allcr franchir le Rhin. 
Mais, bcaucoup plus souvent, elle transmettra non sculcment ses productions, mais les 
productions nnglaises, et ensuite les productions germaniques. A Rome, a Madrid. 4 
Lisbonne. Elle les transmettra, non pas commc un simple courrier, indifferent A ce qu’il 
transporte; au contraire, elle fera leur toilette; elle les accommodera “aux usages 
communs de 1‘Europc": c’est-A-dire au goOt qui rigne en Europe par son fait, au goGt 
fran^ais. Ccs Anglais ne sont pas clairs, il faut les decanter; ils n'obiissent pas aux lois 
de la logique formelle, il faut introduire de 1’ordre dans leurs idies; ils sont diffus, il 
faut les abrrfger; ils sont grossiers, i) faut les affiner. Elle se met A l'ceuvre, change, 
coupe, rctaille les habits, met sur les visages de la poudre et du rouge. Les personnages 
qu’clle pr<sente au monde, npris son travail, sont encore exotiques, mais A peine: juste 
asscz pour plaire sans effaroucher. Elle connait ses mirites; ellc connait le gotit de son 
public et dAs lors ellc prend en mains, avec ses propres intirfits, ceux de I'Angleterrc, 
et ceux de 1‘Europc. Les traducteurs qu’elle emploie se haussent en dignite; leur tflche 
n’est plus cellc d’un simple mamruvre qui vise A la fVddlitd servile; ils deviennent des 
cr^ateurs, en second; A tout le moins des plteipotcntiaircs’ (Hazard, P.: La Crist de la 
Conscience Europlenne (1680-1713) (Paris 1935, Boivin), pp. 73-74)- 





5 x8 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION 
Modern Western Science had been adroitly pumped up by a series of 
talented popularizers, from Fontenelle 1 to Wells, but on a linguistic 
terrain which was the most superficial of all its layers. The English 
language, for example, had latterly won its competition with the French 
by gaining currency in India, China, and Japan as a lingua franca serving 
as a medium of intercourse for the pedestrian practical purposes of trade 
and politics 2 before the non-Western societies that had taken to using 
this Western linguistic medium for these purposes had come to be more 
than slightly affected by the rest of the Western culture—above all, its 
Christian religious nucleus—of which the English language and the 
other Western vernaculars were potential vehicles. 

These illustrations of our ‘law’ from the history of the diffusion of the 
Modern Western culture have their counterparts in Hellenic and Far 
Eastern history. Wc have seen 3 that a Syriac World which had not 
proved receptive to the Hellenic culture in its integral form was capti¬ 
vated eventually, in the 'Abbasid Age, by an intellectual flake of Hellen¬ 
ism in which its science and philosophy were presented apart from its 
art and religion. In an earlier phase of a post-Alexandrine Hellenism’s 
radioactivity the art of the Attic drama had acquired a carrying-power 
when a cosmopolitan association of artistes had treated it, as French 
publicists were to treat the British constitution, by plucking it out of its 
native ground in the orchestra of the theatre of Dionysus under the 
shadow of the acropolis of Athens in order to take it on tour and ‘produce’ 
it with a virtuosity that Parthians and Ccltiberians could appreciate. 4 
Artistic flakes of a Far Eastern culture which had similarly been detached 
from their spiritual core likewise captivated a nascent Iranic Muslim 
Society in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries of the Christian Era, 
and a Modern Western Society from the eighteenth century onwards, 
without any simultaneous radiation of a Confucian philosophy and a 
Mahayanian religion that were the original settings from which these 
fashionably superficial chinoiseries had been detached in order to be 
made exportable at the price of being made meaningless. 

We may go on to observe that, on every plane, a recipient society finds 
it easier to take and use a radiating society’s ready-made products, 
material or spiritual, than to master the techniques, habits, feelings, and 
thoughts that have to be acquired and appropriated if the recipient is to 
become, in his turn, a producer of these alien cultural commodities as 
well as a mere consumer of them. The cultural commodities that have 
the greatest carrying power of all are lethal tools; but a Pathan trans¬ 
frontier barbarian in the no-man’s-land beyond the North-West 
Frontier of the British Indian Empire during the century ending in a.d. 
1947 s would acquire a taste for a Modern Western rifle, and a skill in 

« An illuminating sketch of the eighteenth-century French popularizes of the seven¬ 
teenth-century Western Scientific Revolution will be found in Butterfield, H.: The 
Origins of Modern Science, 1300-2S00 (London 1949, Bell), pp. 143-58. 

* See V. v. 506-12. 3 On pp. 408-9, above. 

* See IV. iv. 243; V. v. 201, n. t, and 481; and p. 405, above. 

» The special case of culture-diffusion across a limes between a universal state and 
the barbarians beyond its pale, of which the history of the North-West Frontier of 
the British Indian Empire is a classical example, has been examined in Part VIII, 
passim, above. 



THE DIFFRACTION OF CULTURE 5 *9 

using it, long before he learnt how to manufacture such a rifle for him¬ 
self, and long indeed before he began to make creative improvements of 
his own upon the alien pattern in which the rifle had first come into his 
hands ready-made—in contrast to the circumstances of the original 
genesis of the rifle in its place of origin in the Western World, where the 
production and the use and the improvement of the weapon had all 
been inseparably bound up with one another in the process of the rifle’s 
evolution. 

Following this contrast up, we shall find that, while the Pathan might 
take with lightning rapidity and astonishing success to a rifle or a sewing- 
machine or a gramophone, and might even teach himself, under the 
stimulus of intense desire, to manufacture a remarkably exact copy of a 
complicated contemporary Western weapon of precision with the simple 
tools that were the sum of his scanty native metallurgical resources, the 
same masterly Pathan marksman and gunsmith would show vastly less 
aptitude for appropriating any of those Western political institutions 
that were part of the secret of the British Raj’s military ascendancy over 
the transfrontier barbarian. It was easier for the barbarian to submit 
temporarily under duress to British political dictation than to take even 
the first toddling step towards mastering the British political art of 
parliamentary government; and the culture which was the creative in¬ 
spiration of all the Western Society’s political and military and techno¬ 
logical achievements was quite beyond the Pathan’s ken even in the 
secularized form, divorced from its religious heart, in which this Western 
culture had been at the disposal of non-Western importers since the 
close of the seventeenth century. 

For instance, our nineteenth-century Pathan knew nothing of the long 
and arduous history of a sustained and organized intellectual endeavour 
that had created Modern Western Science, and nothing either of the 
tragic irony with which an acquisitive-minded Western Society’s lust to 
wring material profits out of the disinterested labours of Western intel¬ 
lectual pioneers had brought in its train its grimly appropriate nemesis 
in the shape of the fascinating Victorian invention of a breech-loading 
rifle which was the earnest of far more deadly future masterpieces of 
a Modern Western Homo Faber's ‘Applied Science’. While the Pathan 
succeeded in becoming a modest profit-sharer in the dividends of this 
prostitution of a new science to an old barbarism to which the Pathan and 
the Frank were, both alike, still morally enslaved in the twentieth century 
of the Christian Era, the Pathan was utterly ignorant of the history of 
that Western moral progress which—feeble and rudimentary though it 
might be found to be when measured by the standards of the Saints— 
had nevertheless succeeded, at the cost of a struggle still more arduous 
and protracted than the assault of Western Science on Physical Nature, 
in enabling some of the Western peoples gradually and partially to 
transmute the Old Adam of government by force into a new covenant of 
government by consent, 1 and thereby to keep Man’s hope of mundane 

« This faint Late Modem Western emanation of the spirit of the Kingdom of God 
in the political slum of the Kingdom’s refractory secular province was sometimes 
identified by latter-day Western idealists, naively but in all good faith, with the spirit 



520 PROCESSES OF RADIATION AND RECEPTION 
salvation alive by opening up a possibility that lethal weapons which 
were so much more dangerous in Frankish than in Pactyan hands might, 
in the event, be banned by a Modern Western Democracy’s crypto- 
Christian conscience, instead of being recklessly misused in the Ishmacli- 
tish warfare which the still unredeemedly barbarous Pathan was prone 
to wage with the deadliest weapons that he knew how to employ. 

It was still more disconcerting to see the self-same selection of 
Western culture-elements that had been made in all innocence by the 
untutored Pathan being made likewise by a sophisticated Chinese whose 
high state of indigenous culture, at the time in his history when he 
encountered the Late Modern West, debarred him from pleading the 
mitigating circumstances that could be pleaded on behalf of his East 
Iranian barbarian contemporary. 

‘There is ... in the process of Westernisation in China a play of fashion 
which often appears irresponsible to Westerners, because random and 
unconvinced. Western standards, far from being considered admirable 
in themselves, arc all suspect and feared as “soulless”, because inimical 
to the spirit of China. Accordingly there appears to be, very often, in the 
course of adaptation to Western standards, a difficulty in distinguishing 
between the mechanics of any given process and the spirit that informs the 
process. In this way attempts are often made to take over a method with¬ 
out adopting the spirit of the society in which the method was originally 
developed, and of which it was the natural fruit. Perhaps the most 
striking illustration of this type of contradiction is to be found in the 
adoption on a large scale of Western armaments with the minimum 
adoption of the Western style in warfare. In the same way, when there is 
a question of handing over to Chinese control any enterprise originally 
developed by foreigners, the least of the difficulties is that of training a 
technical staff. The true crisis comes when, with the full assertion of 
Chinese control, a standard of enterprise and responsible direction based 
on adaptation is substituted for one based on assertion.’ 1 

These illustrations of the working of our ‘law’ that the carrying-power 
of a detached culture-element in process of radiation is apt to be in 
inverse ratio to its spiritual value point to a conclusion at which we have 
arrived by a different road in an earlier context. 2 The transmission of the 
superficial elements of a culture, in isolation from the essence of this 
radioactive culture’s core, is as precarious as it is facile, whereas the 

of Christianity itself. This tragi-comically erroneous identification, which was one of the 
characteristic illusions of Western men of good will in the writer's age, led a distin¬ 
guished contemporary and friend of the writer's, who, like the writer, paid his first visit 
to Shanghai in A.D. 1929, to indulge in the unwarranted and unfulfilled expectation that 
the British complexion of the municipal administration of the International Settlement 
in the soulless city would serve to educate the Chinese World of the day in both the 
practice and the principles of Modem Western ethics by initiating Chinese politicians 
into the neo-pagan mysteries of Modem Western constitutional government. This 
Modern Western political idealist showed himself to be a true prophet in divining and 
proclaiming the truth that the Western institution of parliamentary government was 
built on a rock of ethical principle. The reason why his hopes for China were disappointed 
was because he had failed to bear in mind the more fundamental truth that the Western 
World's political morality was a moon which shone only with a borrowed and reflected 
light, and that the sun of Christianity, which was the ultimate source of this pale political 
illumination, was a luminary whose radiance was, not political, but religious. 

1 Lattimore, Owen: Manchuria, Cradle o] Conflict (New York r932. Macmillan), pp. 
> 53 - 4 - 2 In V. v. 2or. 



THE DIFFRACTION OF CULTURE 521 
religious quintessence of a radioactive culture, which penetrates an 
alien body social only with extreme difficulty, and even then at an 
extremely slow pace, is capable, if and when it docs work its way into 
this alien body’s heart, of producing a spiritually deeper effect on the 
recipient society’s life than the sum of all the radioactive society’s merely 
artistic or intellectual or linguistic or political or economic radiation 
when these superficial elements are transmitted apart from the religious 
life-blood of the migrant culture’s heart. 


B28M.nn 


S 2 



E. THE CONSEQUENCES OF ENCOUNTERS 
BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

(I) AFTERMATHS OF UNSUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 

(fl) EFFECTS ON THE FORTUNES OF THE ASSAULTED PARTY 

T HE effect of an encounter between contemporaries on the life of 
both parties is apt to be a disturbing one—and this even for a party 
which, at the time of the encounter, is not yet in process of disintegration 
but is still in growth. Even in the least untoward possible circum¬ 
stances the psychological shock produced by a collision between conflict¬ 
ing civilizations may have consequences of a gravity that is illustrated by 
the fates of two societies which, while still in growth, had each repelled 
a formidable assault triumphantly. 

The Hellenic Society, as we have seen, reacted magnificently to its 
ordeal in the years 480-479 B.c. It succeeded in repulsing an onslaught 
delivered by a Syriac Society whose forces were united at the time under 
the oecumenical sovereignty of the Achaemenian Empire; and the first 
perceptible social effect of this military and political triumph was to 
give I Icllenism a stimulus to which it responded by bursting into flower 
in ever)' field of activity. 

‘The vastness of the forces employed in the expedition of Xerxes King 
of Persia against Hellas cast the shadow of a terrible danger over the 
Hellenic Society. The stakes for which the Hellenes were called upon to 
fight were slavery or freedom, while the fact that the Hellenic communities 
in Asia had already been enslaved created a presumption in every mind 
that the communities in Hellas itself would experience the same fate. 
When, however, the war resulted, contrary to expectation, in its amazing 
issue, the inhabitants of Hellas found themselves not only relieved from 
the dangers which had threatened them but possessed, in addition, of 
honour and glory, while every Hellenic community was filled with such 
affluence that the whole World was astonished at the completeness with 
which the situation had been reversed. During the half-century that 
followed this epoch, Hellas made vast strides in prosperity. ... In the 
forefront of all, Athens achieved such triumphs of glory and prowess that 
her name won almost world-wide renown.’* 

Yet, within less than fifty years of the momentous encounter whose 
cultural outcome was this Attic flowering of Hellenism, the political out¬ 
come of the same encounter came to a climax in a disaster which Hellas 
first failed to avert and then failed to retrieve; and the root of her post- 
Salaminian political disaster was the same sudden brilliant emergence 
of Athens which had likewise been the root of the post-Salaminian out¬ 
burst of Hellenic cultural achievement. 

In other contexts 2 we have noticed that, in the age of Hellenic history 
preceding the Achaemcnids’ epoch-making attempt to incorporate the 

1 Diodorus of Agyrium: A Library oj Universal History, Book XII, chaps. 1-2*, 
quoted in full in II. li. 109. 

1 See, for instance, I. i. 24-25 and III. iii. 122. 



EFFECTS ON THE ASSAULTED PARTY 523 
whole of the Hellenic World into their oecumenical empire, Hellas had 
accomplished an economic revolution through which she had enabled 
herself to maintain a growing population within a no-longer expanding 
domain by substituting a new economic regime of specialization and 
interdependence for an old one in which each single Hellenic city-state, 
and indeed each single village within each civic territory, had been living 
as an economically autonomous unit providing for its own subsistence 
by producing at home all the staple products that it required. In this 
economic revolution in Hellas in the sixth century B.c., Athens had 
played a decisively creative part ; 1 but the resulting new economic 
regime of interdependence could not be maintained unless it could be 
housed within the framework of a new political regime of the same 
order, while on the other hand it could not with impunity be allowed to 
collapse for lack of being reinforced by its requisite political comple¬ 
ment, since this new economic regime of interdependence had no sooner 
been achieved than it had become indispensable to Hellas in virtue of 
its being her sole practicable response to the challenge of finding her 
aggressive geographical expansion brought to a halt by a successful 
resistance on the part of her neighbours and competitors in the Mediter¬ 
ranean Basin . 2 Before the close of the sixth century b.c. some form of 
political unification to match the accomplished fact of economic inter¬ 
dependence had thus become the Hellenic World’s most urgent social 
need; and during the half century ending in the ordeal of 480-479 B.c. 
it had looked as if the solution of this common Hellenic problem would 
be found for Hellas—if it was to be found by any Hellenic community— 
not by the Athens of Solon and Peisistratus but by the Sparta of Chilon 
and Clcomcnes I. 

During those fifty years Sparta had been giving a promising lead 
towards political unification by helping the economically progressive 
Continental European Greek city-states in the neighbourhood of the 
Isthmus of Corinth to throw off the despotic governments that had been 
the Hellenic economic revolution’s local political concomitants, and 
then bringing the communities that had thus been liberated from a 
domestic tyranny into an easy-going political association with the 
liberator Power. The Achaemenian Empire’s lowering threat to engulf 
European Greece could perhaps be converted into a blessing in disguise 
for Hellas if the imperative requirements of self-defence in an impend¬ 
ing military struggle against a gigantic alien aggressor were to impel her 
children to achieve the political unification which her economic trans¬ 
formation was now imperatively demanding; and, incidentally, Hellas’ 
immediate crying need might prove a heaven-sent opportunity for Sparta, 
if she could rise to the occasion by uniting under her military and politi¬ 
cal leadership the whole of the still unsubjugated European half of the 
Hellenic World, as she had already united European Greece’s Pelopon¬ 
nesian extremity. Unhappily, in this crisis with which Hellas was con¬ 
fronted by Darius’s fateful resolve to bring European as well as Asiatic 
Greece under Achaemenian rule, 3 Sparta left it to Athens to play the 

' See II. ii. 38-42- 1 See pp. 423-9. »*>ove. 

» See pp. 430-5. »bove. 



524 AFTERMATHS OF UNSUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
beau r 6 le\ l and, in consequence, the Hellenic World’s exhilarating 
experience in 480-479 B.c. of a deadly danger triumphantly surmounted 
not only failed, after all, to bring with it for her the boon of political 
unification under the universally accepted hegemony of a single Hellenic 
Power, 2 but actually placed athwart her path towards unification an 
obstacle which her children failed thereafter to surmount. 

1 The sublimity of Leonidas' and his three hundred fellow Lacedaemonians’ personal 
self-sacrifice in their forlorn hope at Thermopylae in 480 b.c. was more than offset, 
in Sparta’s moral account with Hellas, by the political selfishness and strategic fatuous¬ 
ness of the Lacedaemonian Government s contemporary public policy. A Power which, 
in the crisis of 490 B.c.,had ignominiously failed to put in an appearance on the battle¬ 
field of Marathon until after the Achaemcnian expeditionary force had been repulsed 

a the Athenians and Plataeans single-handed, ran true to form in the greater crisis 
480 B.C., when Sparta refused to stake the whole of her magnificent infantry- on trying 
to hold the pass of Tcmpe, or even the pass of Thermopylae, in concert with Athens 
magnificent navy. The example shown to Hellas at Thermopylae by Leonidas and his 
token force was the soldiers’ deed and not their Government's. While Leonidas and his 
companions were sacrificing their lives, the Lacedaemonian Government's one idea was 
to look after the parochial interests of Laconia and her Peloponnesian neighbours by 
fortifying the Isthmus of Corinth; and, in compromising their country’s honour by 
staking her existence on this poor-spirited plan, they do not appear to have reflected 
that, in thus abandoning Attica as well as the central and northern sections of Continental 
European Greece, they were virtually inviting the Athenians to capitulate to the invader 
and were thereby doing their worst to deprive themselves of the assistance of the 
Athenian Navy, without which the Peloponnese would have been indefensible. If, after 
the Persians’ break-through at Thermopylae, the Athenians had shown the same un¬ 
inspired common sense as was shown by the Thebans, the Athenian Navy would either 
have gone out of action or would have changed sides, and in either of these events the 
Peloponnesians’ Isthmian wall would have been outflanked by the naval operations of 
an irresistibly superior enemy sea-power without any need for the land-troops of the 
Achaemcnian expeditionary force to attempt to storm the Isthmus by a frontal attack. 
The situation was saved for the Peloponnese, as well as for Hellas as a whole, by the 
Athenians' decision, in this supreme emergency, to emulate the heroism of a Spartan 
Leonidas whose own Government had failed to catch the hero’s inspiration. By sum¬ 
moning up the fortitude to keep the sea after the enemy's occupation of their country 
and devastation of their city, the Athenians won for Hellas her decisive naval victory at 
Salamis. 

Even after Athens had thus saved the Peloponnese at Salamis in 480 b.c., the Lace¬ 
daemonian Government managed nevertheless to come within an ace of losing the war 
for Hellas after all in 479 B.C. by threatening to ‘miss the bus' for Plataca as they had 
previously 'missed the bus’ for Marathon; and, in the event, the Hellenic victory- at 
Plataea, like the Hellenic feat of arms at Thermopylae, was a soldiers' battle and not an 
achievement of generalship or statesmanship, as far as the Lacedaemonians were con¬ 
cerned. Moreover, the Lacedaemonian soldier’s magnificent faithfulness to his tradi¬ 
tional standards of military honour and prowess was offset after the Battle of Plataca, 
once again, by disgraceful conduct in high places. The Lacedaemonian Government’s 
cowardice after Thermopylae was eclipsed after Plataea by the treachery of the Lace¬ 
daemonian commander under whose official auspices the victory had been won. When 
it came, in the next phase of the war, to carrying the hostilities into Achaemcnian terri¬ 
tory for the purpose of liberating those Hellenic communities that had been under 
Achaemcnian rule before 480 B.C., the Spartan Regent Pausanias demonstrated his own 
imperviousness to the inspiration of his uncle King Leonidas by surrendering un¬ 
conditionally to the temptation of allowing himself to be dazzled by a signally defeated 
Achaemcnian Imperial Majesty’s tinsel sheen of pomp and circumstance. In the act of 
disgracing himself by losing his head and becoming a renegade, Pausanias lost for hi* 
country the leadership in the war for the liberation of the Asiatic Hellenes from an 
Achaemcnian yoke. 

2 The indispensability of a centralization of leadership in the hands of a single 
Power, as a condition for the achievement of political unity, must have been impressed 
on Hellenic minds in the generation of the Great Helleno-Persian War by a then still 
painfully recent Hellenic experience. Less than fifty years before 480 b.c. a long- 
sustained Hellenic campaign of aggression against the Hellenes’ Phoenician competitors in 
the West ern Mediterranean had been effectively arrested by a union of the Libyphoenician 
city-states under the hegemony of Carthage (see pp. 426-9. above). The opportunity 
that the Carthaginians had thus seized when the challenge of Hellenic aggression had 
presented it was now being offered by the challenge of Acliaemenian aggression to 


EFFECTS OK THE ASSAULTED PARTY 525 

Instead of leaving Sparta the unchallenged leader of a Pan-Hellenic 
confederacy, the ordeal of 480-479 b . c . liberated Asiatic Greece from 
Achaemenian rule only to leave the Hellenic World as a whole formid¬ 
ably divided in its political allegiance between a Sparta who had not 
discredited herself so seriously as to forfeit the goodwill of her pre-war 
Peloponnesian allies and an Athens who had not distinguished herself 
so irresistibly as to overcome the repugnance of her post-war insular and 
Asiatic satellites to their exchange of a Persian domination for an Athenian 
hegemony. This division of Hellas into two mutually hostile camps was 
a consequence of the impact of her encounter with the Achaemenian 
Empire on her problem of transcending her own political parochialism; 
and this domestic outcome of her victorious repulse of Darius’s and 
Xerxes’ assault proved in retrospect to have been a fatal turning-point 
in her history when she met with the fall that overtakes every house 
that remains stubbornly divided against itself. 1 The opposing camps 
eventually drifted into the Atheno-Peloponnesian War, and the out¬ 
break of that war signified the breakdown of the Hellenic Civilization. 

The plight of political polarization that was the portentous price of the 
Hellenic Society’s victory in its military encounter with a Syriac univer¬ 
sal state in the shape of the Achaemenian Empire was likewise the fate 
by which the Hellenic World’s successor, Orthodox Christendom, was 
overtaken in the sequel to this civilization’s still more amazing victory, 
in the hour of its own birth, over a Syriac universal state that had been 
re-established in the seventh century of the Christian Era in the shape of 
the Arab Caliphate. 2 On the morrow- of the defeat of the Arabs’ attempt 
to take Constantinople in a.d. 673-7, an Orthodox Christendom which 
had purchased by this victory the possibility of coming to life came 
within an ace of committing suicide when an Anatolic and an Armeniac 
army corps threatened to engage in a fratricidal struggle for supremacy 
which would have been as fatal for Orthodox Christendom as the struggle 
between Sparta and Athens had been for Hellas. 

Orthodox Christendom was saved from this fate by the genius of her 
Emperors Leo III and his son Constantine V; J by the union sacree which 
was forced upon her Anatolic and Armeniac rival champions when the 
Arab offensive was resumed in a.d. 716-18; and by the abiding and 
compelling memory of a Roman Empire which had been the master 
institution of an antecedent Hellenic Society in the last phase of its 
history. The hold of this memory upon Orthodox Christian hearts and 
minds made it possible for Leo and Constantine to persuade the two 
rival army corps to liquidate their feud by agreeing with one accord to 
merge themselves in a unitary East Roman Empire that made an 
irresistible appeal to their imagination and their loyalty by presenting 
itself as a Rome risen from the dead. 4 The raising of a ghost, however, is 
not a means of salvation that can ever be embraced with impunity; and, 


Sparta in the Hellenic World in the next chapter of the story of the encounter between 
a Syriac and a pre-Alexandrine Hellenic Civilization. 

> Matt. xii. 25; Luke xi. 17. 

s The historical relation between the Arab Caliphate and the Achaemenian Empire 
has been tentatively elucidated in I. i. 76-77. 

J See IV. iv. 341-2. 4 See II. ii. 368 and III. iii. 276. 


S 26 AFTERMATHS OF UNSUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
in saddling an infant Orthodox Christendom with the incubus of an 
absolute authoritarian state, Leo Syrus merely postponed her fall with¬ 
out averting it. He saved her from ruining herself in a fratricidal struggle 
between an Anatolic and an Armeniac army corps in the eighth century 
of the Christian Era by giving an unfortunate turn to her political 
development; and this perversion brought its nemesis when, some 250 
years later, the breakdown of the Orthodox Christian Civilization duly 
declared itself in the outbreak of a more terrible fratricidal struggle 
between an East Roman Empire and Patriarchate on the one side and a 
Bulgarian Empire and Patriarchate on the other. 1 

If an Orthodox Christian and an Hellenic Society thus each alike 
eventually succumbed to untoward after-effects of an encounter with 
an aggressive contemporary after the aggressor had been triumphantly 
repelled by Hellas in her youth and by Orthodox Christendom in her 
infancy, we shall not be surprised to find at least as unhappy an effect 
following from the discomfiture of aggressors by civilizations that have 
been already in process of disintegration by the time when they have 
been overtaken by these critical encounters. 

We have already taken note of the price for success in arresting 
Hellenic aggression that was exacted by History from the Libyphocnician 
colonies of a Syriac Society which had broken down, some four hundred 
years before, on the morrow of the generation of King Solomon. 2 The 
price was a spiritually impoverishing regime of self-insulation behind 
‘a wooden curtain’. 3 We have also observed 4 that the ‘hermit empire’ 
which was established in the sixth century B.c. round the Western Basin 
of the Mediterranean by Carthage had an avatar in the sixteenth century 
of the Christian Era on the farther side of the Atlantic Ocean round the 


Spanish Main; and we can now go on to observe that this Spanish re- 



tion of the Carthaginian feat of arresting the expansion of Hellenism; for, 
at this same price, the Spaniards in their turn succeeded in arresting the 
intrusion of their Dutch, English, and French West European neigh¬ 
bours and rivals into the Americas. 

In a Japanese offshoot of the Far Eastern Society an Early Modern 
Western Christendom’s attempt to penetrate this alien body social 
through the peaceful influence of traders and missionaries at the 
moment of the final paroxysm of a Japanese Time of Troubles was 
successfully quashed by drastic Japanese counter-measures on the 
morrow of the establishment of a Japanese universal state; and this 
Japanese success in expelling and excluding the Portuguese intruders, 
and in eradicating or driving underground the Tridentine Roman 
Catholic Christianity which the Jesuits had been planting in a Japanese 
mission-field, was purchased, like the abortive contemporary Spanish 
attempt to keep the Spaniards’ fellow West European maritime rivals 

1 The chain of historical cause and effect leading from the establishment of the East 
Roman Empire by I.eo 111 and Constantine V in a.d. 717-75 to the outbreak of the Great 
Romano-Bulgarian War in A.D. 977 has been tiaced in II. ii. 368-9 and in IV. iv. 
320-408. • * See I. i. 82 and IV. iv. 67-68. 

1 Sec pp. 428-9 and 437-8, above. 4 On pp. 485-6, above. 



EFFECTS ON THE ASSAULTED PARTY 527 
out of the Americas, at the price of putting a stop to all Japanese 
activities beyond the coasts of the Japanese Archipelago and converting 
a politically united Japan into an hermetically sealed Far Eastern counter¬ 
part of the less effectually closed Castilian Empire of the Indies . 1 

These Japanese, Spanish, and Libyphoenician examples of the 
spiritual toll exacted by History from an assaulted society for its success 
in repulsing its assailant’s attack arc all dwarfed by the enormity of the 
latter end of an Egyptiac Civilization which paid for its success in fend¬ 
ing off its Hittite assailants in the thirteenth century B.c., and in arrest¬ 
ing the avalanche of a post-Minoan Volkerwandcrung at the turn of the 
thirteenth and twelfth centuries, by incurring the doom of Tithonus . 2 

If we now take a synoptic view of the passages of history which we 
have cited as illustrations in our present inquiry’, our survey may suggest 
certain tentative findings. Without impugning our conclusion, reached 
in an earlier Part of this Study , 1 that the coroner’s verdict on the ‘deaths’ 
of civilizations proves invariably to be ‘suicide’ and not ‘murder’ in 
cases in which there is sufficient evidence to warrant a judgement, our 
present investigation seems to indicate that an assault, even when 
successfully repulsed, has a seriously disturbing effect on the assaulted 
party’s domestic life, and that this disturbance presents a challenge 
which—whether prohibitively severe or not—had in fact proved too 
much for the parties that had been exposed to it in all cases within the 
knowledge of historians in the sixth decade of the twentieth century of 
the Christian Era. In the cases in which the victorious assaulted society 
had been still in its growth-stage at the time of the assault, its failure 
to respond successfully to the consequent challenge had resulted in its 
breaking down, while, in the cases in which, at the time, it had already 
been in disintegration, the penalty of failure to meet the same consequent 
challenge had been a spiritual catalepsy and a symptomatic social petri¬ 
faction to which the Libyphoenicians, the Creoles, and the Japanese had 
each succumbed for a spell, and the Egyptiac Society for all the rest of 
an unnaturally prolonged life-span. 

(6) EFFECTS ON THE FORTUNES OF THE ASSAILANT 

If we now go on to examine the aftermaths of unsuccessful assaults 
in the subsequent histories of the foiled assailants, we shall find that the 
consequent challenges have proved severe a fortiori. 

The Hittites, for example, were, as we have seen, left so desperately 
weak by their over-exertion in their eventually unsuccessful attempt to 
conquer the Egyptian Crown’s Asiatic possessions in the fourteenth and 
thirteenth centuries b.c. that they were subsequently submerged by the 
wave of a post-Minoan Volkerwandcrung which the Egyptiac World just 
managed to roll back from the coast of the Delta—with the consequence 
that a Hittite Society, which had been still in growth at the time when it 

« See pp. 3x6-24, above. The Dutch trading settlement marooned on the islet of 
Deshima, which was the solitary unsevered link between Japan and the rest of the World 
during the Tokugawa Age of Japanese history, has been noticed in II. ii. 232-4. 

» Sec I. i. 136-46; IVT iv. S4-6; and VI. vii. 49 " 5 ©- 

* In IV. iv. n5-19. 



528 AFTERMATHS OF UNSUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
succumbed, survived only in the fragmentary form of a cluster of fossil 
communities astride the Taurus, whereas the Egyptiac Society survived 
geographically intact in its posthumous state of life-in-death. The after- 
math of the Siceliot Greeks’ abortive aggression against their Phoenician 
and Etruscan competitors took the milder form of a political paralysis 
which did not cripple their artistic and intellectual activities. 

As we have noticed in another context, 1 the exigencies of a long- 
drawn-out losing battle against the counter-offensive of a Libyphoenician 
World, that had effectively united its own forces under a Carthaginian 
single command, constrained the hard-pressed Siceliotsto sacrifice their 
cherished local city-state sovereignties and liberties by allowing them¬ 
selves to be brigaded under the yokes of military despotisms; but the 
Siceliots in the fifth, fourth, and third centuries B.C., like the Italians in 
the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries of the Christian Era, 2 
condemned themselves to have the worst of both worlds by failing to 
go beyond half-measures. Instead of emulating their Libyphoenician 
antagonists’ rewarding sixth-century achievement of an enduring poli¬ 
tical unity under the hegemony of a single one of their number, the 
Siceliots never achieved more than local and temporary consolidations 
of political and military power which deprived them of the boons of 
national independence and domestic freedom without sufficing to re¬ 
capture for them the upper hand in their conflict with the Carthaginian 
Empire; and in the last chapter of the story, when they were within an 
ace of being totally subjugated by the remorseless advance of this semi- 
Hcllcnized Syriac counter-aggressor, they were saved only at the cost 
of having to exchange the ineffective rule of their home-grown parochial 
despots for the potent dominion of a Hellenized barbarian Great Power. 
Rome not only stemmed the Carthaginian attack on the Hellenic World; 
she banished this Carthaginian peril once for all by breaking through 
a ‘wooden curtain’ that had proved impenetrable for over 250 years, 
and sweeping the Carthaginian Empire off the map. In the Romano- 
Punic Wars the Romans attained an Hellenic objective which had always 
eluded the Siceliot Greek despots’ aim, in virtue of a Roman genius 
for empire-building that utterly outranged the shorter-sighted political 
vision of the Dcinomenidae and Dionysii. 

If the aftermath of an unsuccessful assault on a contemporary society 
proved to be as serious as this for a Hittite and an Hellenic World which 
were both still in process of growth at the time of their fateful en¬ 
counters with an Egyptian neighbour in the one case and with a Liby¬ 
phoenician neighbour in the other, it is not surprising to find disaster 
overtaking the main body of a Syriac World which had tried and failed 
to make itself mistress of Hellas at a stage of Syriac history at which the 
disintegration of a broken-down society had arrived at its ultima ratio , 
a universal state. In an earlier chapter of this Part of our Study 3 we have 
watched the Achaemenian hybris that had inveigled Darius the First 
into his decision to annex European Greece duly bringing its nemesis 
in the overthrow of Darius the Last by Alexander of Macedon. 

■ In III. iii. 357, n. 1. i See III. iii. 354-7. 

1 On pp. 430-7, above. 



529 

(II) AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 

(a) EFFECTS ON THE BODY SOCIAL 

I. Symptoms in the Social Life of the Assailant 

We have observed 1 that, in encounters between contemporaries in 
which ‘the agent’s’ impact on ‘the reagent’ has resulted in a successful 
penetration of the assaulted body social by the assailant’s cultural radia¬ 
tion, the two parties to the encounter usually prove to have been already 
in process of disintegration by the time when the interaction between 
them had begun; and we have also observed 2 that one of the criteria of 
disintegration is the schism of the body social of a disintegrating society 
into a minority that has come to be merely dominant instead of being 
creative and a proletariat that has come to be morally alienated from 
ci-devant leaders who have turned into changeling masters. This social 
schism is likely to have occurred already in the body social of a society 
whose cultural radiation is successfully penetrating the body social of one 
of its neighbours; and the social symptom that is the most signal conse¬ 
quence of this always untoward and often undesired social success is an 
aggravation of the problem which the secession of an internal proletariat 
presents to a dominant minority in any case. A proletariat is intrinsically 
an awkward element in a society, even when it is a purely home-grown 
product; but its awkwardness is sharply accentuated if its numerical 
strength is reinforced, and its cultural complexion is variegated, by an 
intake of alien man-power; and this is the penalty which a successfully 
aggressive society is bound to pay—and the revenge which its success¬ 
fully assaulted victim is able to take. 

In a previous chapter of this Part 1 we have noticed the efforts of 
Roman, Hapsburg, and American statesmanship to stem this insidious 
counterflow of cultural influence; but our earlier survey of the growth 
and composition of an Hellenic and a Western internal proletariat 4 is a 
commentary on the futility of attempting to arrest the subtle progress of 
a culture-ray by placing athwart its path the coarse-grained fabric of a 
political bulkhead. Iam pridem Syrus in Tiberim dejluxit Orontes 5 would 
have been as true a verdict on the efficacy of the Hapsburg Imperial- 
Royal Government’s phobia in a. d. 1915-18 against further annexations 
of Orthodox-Christian-inhabited territories, or on the efficacy of the 
United States immigration restriction acts of a.d. 1921 and a.d. 1924 
and a.d. 1952, as it was on the efficacy of Augustus’s reluctance to in¬ 
crease the relative strength of the Oriental element in the population 
and the culture of the Roman Empire by salvaging for a post-Alexandrine 
Hellenism her lost Oriental dominions east of Euphrates. 

In a Modern Western World that had made itself literally world-wide 
by radiating its influence over the whole habitable surface of the Earth, 
not only the Orontes but the Ganges and the Yangtse had discharged 
into the Thames and the Hudson, while the Danube had performed the 

1 On p. 507. above. 1 In V. v. 58-194- 

J On pp. 510-14. above. * See V. v. 58-82 and 152-94. 

» Juvenal: Satires, No. Ill, 1. 62, quoted in V. v. 67. 


53 © AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
more sensational miracle of reversing the direction of its flow in order 
to deposit a cultural alluvium of Rum an and Serb and Bulgar and 
Greek proselytes up-stream in a Viennese melting-pot. Si testimonium 
requiris, was not the evidence printed in extenso and made public in the 
telephone directories of Vienna 1 and Paris and London and New York 
and Chicago and a host of lesser cities in the European and American 
provinces of a Western Society’s homeland ? And did not these endless 
columns of close print, bristling with outlandish non-Western surnames, 
attest the advent, in a twentieth-century Westernizing World, of the 
blight of promiscuity 2 that had been demoralizing a Hcllenizing World 
in Juvenal’s day? 

The social price that a successfully aggressive civilization has to pay 
is a seepage of its alien victims’ exotic culture into the lifestream of the 
aggressor society’s internal proletariat and a proportionate widening of 
the moral gulf that already yawns between this alienated proletariat 
and a would-be dominant minority. 

2. Symptoms in the Social Life of the Assaulted Party 
(a) 'One Man's Meat is Another Man's Poison' 

The effects of a successful assault on the body social of the assaulted 
party are more complex, without being less pernicious, than the corres¬ 
ponding effects on the body social of the victim’s victorious assailant. 
On the one hand we shall find that a culture-element which has been 
harmless or actually beneficial in the body social in which it is at home 
is apt to produce novel and devastating effects in an alien body in which 
it has lodged itself as an exotic and isolated intruder. On the other hand 
we shall find that, when once an isolated exotic culture-element has 
thus succeeded in forcing an entry into the life of an assaulted society, 
and in holding its ground in this occupied alien territory, it tends to 
draw in after it other elements of the same provenance with which the 
lone pioneer element has been associated in its and their original com¬ 
mon home. It will be convenient to examine the working of these tw'o 
apparent ‘laws’ of cultural radiation-and-reccption in the order in which 
we have just introduced them; and, in considering first the ‘law’ that 
a culture-element W’hich has been harmless at home is apt to work 
havoc if it is isolated and exported, we may begin by observing that the 
operation of this law is familiar to us in the realms of Physical Life and 
Inanimate Nature. 

It is, for example, one of the common experiences of every-day 
physical life that this or that individual human being may have a diges¬ 
tive system that is peculiar in being ‘allergic’ to foods that are standing 
dishes in his society’s staple diet; and, in the intercourse between one 
society' and another, it is notorious that alcoholic drinks which may have 
a comparatively innocuous effect upon members of a society in which 
the use of alcohol is customary may prove deadly when introduced into 
a society in which strong drink has previously been unknown. In a 
Westernizing World this had been the effect of the spirituous liquors 

« See VI. vii. 235 , n. i. * See V. v. 439-568. 



‘ONE MAN’S MEAT ANOTHER MAN’S POISON’ 53 x 
imported by Western Christian traders on the health of the native 
peoples of West Africa and North America; and what had been true 
of the ‘fire-water’ that was 'the Paleface’s’ familiar spirit had been 
likewise true of the infectious diseases that were his commonplace 
maladies. A whooping-cough that was a mild complaint when it attacked 
a Western child, and no worse than an unpleasant ordeal when it 
attacked a Western adult, might decimate or even exterminate the 
population of a Polynesian island never previously exposed to attack 
by a germ whose chosen vessel had been Western Man; and in the 
writer’s generation the operation of the same law in the realm of In¬ 
animate Nature had been shown up in a ghastly light by a horrifying 
practical application of post-Modern Western Man’s intellectually 
magnificent theoretical feat of discerning the structure of the Atom. 
The discovery of ‘the know-how’ for manufacturing atomic bombs and 
the consequent employment of these unprecedentedly potent weapons 
in a world war had brought home even to the least scientifically in¬ 
structed mind of the day the terrifying potentialities of a physical 
element which was harmlessly or even usefully inert so long as the 
electron-components of its atoms were duly gravitating round their 
atomic nucleus in the pattern of atomic structure that had been normal 
in the physical ‘make-up’ of this planet during the aeon in which it had 
been serving as a home for living creatures. The fate of Hiroshima and 
Nagasaki had demonstrated that a hitherto innocuous substance might 
become explosive to a degree that would be lethal for all life within 
range when human ingenuity had learnt the trick of stripping an atom’s 
sun-like nucleus of the electrons that were its planet-like satellites. The 
disastrous human consequences of this audacious technological feat 
had been foreshadowed in the Hellenic myths of the unleashing of 
Aeolus’s wind-bag 1 and the opening of Pandora’s box. 1 

In this latter-day atomic exposition of our law the explanation of this 
law’s working was manifest. The latent physical energy, of a deadly 
potency, that was released through the splitting of an atom, had been 
kept in store in the intact structure of the integral atom through being 
neutralized there by an equilibrium of forces that was an expression, in 
terms of force, of the atom’s structural pattern. It will be seen that, in 
the integral atom, the destructive potentialities of the constituents had 
been held in check by an inanimate equivalent of the sociality which was 
the working constitution of Physical as well as Spiritual Life. This rela¬ 
tion of interdependence and consequent reciprocal obligation between 
the cells composing a living body and the organism constituted by these 
components was indeed the elixir of Life—as was demonstrated by the 
deadliness of the cancer by which a living organism was afflicted when¬ 
ever any of its cells sought to live just for and by themselves without 
regard to the social reciprocity which was the necessary condition of 
survival for body and cells alike. 

This law governing the cells’ relations with the whole organism and 
with one another was also operative in their relations with foreign 

1 Odyssey, Book X, II. 19-55. 

1 Hesiod: Works and Days, II. 42-105, especially 11 . 83-104. 



532 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
organic substances, whether dead or alive. The unlucky individual for 
whom his neighbours’ meat was poison was plagued with this personal 
infirmity owing to some peculiarity in the chemical composition of his 
body’s gastric juices which produced a dyspeptic chemical reaction 
when these juices encountered the particular food to which this parti¬ 
cular individual was ‘allergic’—in contrast to the eupeptic reaction 
produced in a normal stomach by an encounter between exactly the 
same food and a battery of gastric juices of the standard brew. In the 
more fateful battles between a living organism’s defence-force of 
soldier-cells and the hostile intrusive germs whose invasion was diag¬ 
nosed by medical practitioners as one of the recognized diseases, the 
reason why an identical disease was sometimes apt to be more serious 
for adults than for children, or vice versa, was presumably because, at 
different ages, the assaulted organism’s defensive equipment for oppos¬ 
ing the attack of an identical aggressor would vary according to the 
stage of life in which the victim of the attack happened to be caught by 
his assailant, with the consequence that the transitions from one age 
to another would be accompanied by variations in the relative strength 
of the combatants in this warfare between bacteria and phagocytes. 

On the same view of an ailing human body as the battlefield of two 
opposing armies, we can also see why the effects of an identical disease 
on different victims should differ in the degree of their severity when 
the difference between the victims was not the difference in age between 
children and adults within the bosom of the same society but the differ¬ 
ence in experience and expectation between members of a society in 
which the disease in question had long been endemic and members of 
another society which had hitherto been exempt from this particular 
malady. In a society in which a disease was rife, the white corpuscles in 
the body of every living human being would have been stimulated, 
exercised, and trained by their experience of repeated past encounters 
with a perennial invader to be perpetually on the alert for a fresh attack, 
and to meet this attack, when it came, with a vigour and skill inspired by 
an awareness of a familiar enemy’s special points of strength and weak¬ 
ness. By contrast, the identically constituted white corpuscles in the 
bodies of members of a society which this identical disease was visiting 
for the first time would be apt to succumb to an unfamiliar aggressor 
whose attack would have taken them by surprise and whose armaments 
and tactics would have been novel to them. 

It will now have become apparent that our ‘law* to the effect that ‘one 
man’s meat is another man’s poison’ represents, in the province of 
external relations between one individual or society and another, the 
local operation of a law of wader currency which we have already observed 
in action in the province of an individual’s or society’s internal affairs. 1 
In studying what happens in the domestic life of a society when a fresh 
dynamic force asserts itself—or a fresh creative movement starts—from 
within, we have seen that this new event is bound to be a challenge to the 
existing pattern of culture-elements which is the basis of the society’s 
present state of health, and that this challenge cannot be ignored 

* See IV. iv. 133-7. 



•ONE MAN’S MEAT ANOTHER MAN’S POISON’ 5 33 
with impunity. In the new situation that the new event has produced, 
social health can be preserved only through an adjustment of the old 
pattern to accommodate the new feature, and this adjustment is tanta¬ 
mount to a replacement of the old pattern by a new one, or, in other 
words, to a thorough-going reconstruction of this particular social 
universe. 1 

The penalty for ignoring the necessity of making this adjustment, 
or for seeking to evade it, is either a revolution, in which the new-born 
dynamic force shatters a traditional culture-pattern that has proved too 
rigid to afford it accommodation, or else an enormity engendered by 
the introduction of the new force’s demonic driving-power into the 
structure of an obstinately rigid culture-pattern whose fabric has proved 
tough enough to withstand the new force’s unprecedentedly powerful 
pressure. It will be seen that the encounter between a new culture- 
clement and an old culture-pattern is always governed by the same 
law, whether the new element happens to emerge from within or to 
impinge from outside. In both these variations on a dramatic situation 
which is the same in both cases in the last analysis, the introduction of 
the new element condemns the old pattern, ipso facto, to undergo a 
change either in its structure or in its working; and, except in so far as 
this inexorable summons of new life is effectively met by an evolutionary 
adjustment of the culture-pattern’s structure, the potentially creative 
and life-giving visitant will actually deal deadly destruction. Its admoni¬ 
tion is: ‘See, I have set before thee this day Life and Good, and Death 
and Evil; 2 alria eXopevov' Geos avairios.’ 3 

In the present place wc are concerned with the situation in which the 
challenging visitant for whom accommodation has to be found if he is 
not to turn a sleepy heaven into a lively hell is an alien intruder who has 
taken the kingdom by force; 4 and, unlike the new-born babe who sub¬ 
verts the kingdom from within, the dark invader is an adult who, before 
Fate cast him for his present cruel role of a miserable deracinc and a 
militant ‘displaced person’, has enjoyed a previous existence as the com¬ 
fortable law-abiding citizen of another kingdom where he has been an 
Israel and not an Ishmael. 

Sociality is a facile virtue for an autochthonous son of the soil who 
possesses a legal domicile as his birthright and who has been brought up 
into a social system of reciprocal rights and duties which, when the 
budding citizen was at his formative age, was a going concern hallowed 
by tradition and tested by experience. This fortunate son of the house 
finds himself born into a social milieu where he has a raison d'itre for his 
existence and a legitimate outlet for his energies in so far as these are 
directed to socially valuable aims, while, in so far as his aims are socially 
undesirable, they are prevented from running amok by a salutary system 
of constitutional checks and balances. But, when Fate transfigures a 

1 In II. i. 277-99 wc have noticed the service performed by the Devil in constraining 

God to resume His work of creation, and thus enabling God to break the deadlock that 
is the nemesis of the perfection of His workmanship. 1 Deut. xxx. 15. 

J 'The choice is the chooser’s responsibility; God is not responsible’ (Plato: Res- 
publica, Book X, 617 s), quoted previously in IV. iv. 465. 

4 Matt. xi. 12; cp. Luke xvi. 16. 



534 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
Minoan Rhadamanthus into a Philistine Goliath, or an inoffensive 
Jewish denizen of the Pale, whose heart and head have been dedicated 
to the interpretation and observance of the Mosaic Law, into a Zionist 
sicarius blessing the Lord his strength, which teachcth his hands to war 
and his fingers to fight , 1 this demoralizing metamorphosis brings bane 
to the Holy Land; and a simile taken from two episodes in the history of 
Palestine may help us to understand how it is possible for a culture- 
element that has played the good citizen’s part in the culture-pattern in 
which it is at home to behave like an outlaw 2 when it has been uprooted 
from its native soil, been divorced from its former associates, and been 
driven into exile in a strange and hostile land. The isolated vagrant 
culture-element plays havoc in the foreign body where it lodges because 
the diffraction that has sundered it from its native setting has, at one 
stroke, deprived it of its previous raison d’etre and released it from the 
discipline of its previous counterweights and antidotes. 

Examples of this devastating play of an expatriated culture-element 
invading an alien social milieu have already come to our notice in our 
survey of encounters between contemporaries in a previous portion of 
this Part . 3 

We have noticed, for instance, some of the tragedies that had been 
inflicted in the course of fourteen centuries on divers non-Westem 
societies by the impact of the Western World’s peculiar political institu¬ 
tion. The essential feature of the Western political ideology had been its 
insistence on taking as its principle of political association the physical 
accident of geographical propinquity, instead of finding the basis for 
a sense of political solidarity in a spiritual affinity of the kind that is both 
reflected in and fostered by a community of religious observances and 
beliefs. At the genesis of a Western Christian Society out of a post- 
Hellenic social interregnum we have seen 4 the emergence of this 
distinctively Western political ideal in Visigothia in the sixth and seventh 
centuries of the Christian Era make life impossible for a local Jewish 
diaspork when this incompatible Gentile ideal collided with the system 
of non-territorial autonomy within an ecclesiastical framework that 
the Jewish diaspork had inherited from its Syriac past. In contrast to the 
new Western ideology of political, social, and cultural Gleichschaltung 
within the arbitrarily drawn frontiers of some barbarian successor-state 


1 Psalm cxliv. i. 

* 'Individuals who have become severed from their background arc restless, un¬ 
satisfied, often desperate creatures, pursued by stinging, reckless impulses. . . . The 
individual who has been prised away from his collective background usually manifests 

3 toms parallel to those found among migrating hordes. The recklessness which so 
spreads throughout an unorganized, migrating mass is a terrifying one. A gold- 
rush, an invading or retreating army in a foreign land, an exodus of people in the mass— 
all have certain characteristics in common, namely a dangerous lowering of respon¬ 
sibility towards human life and property and a sub-human, unthinking urgency which, 
like a river in spate, tends to overrun and destroy everything in its path. Man is not the 
only animal prone to moods of recklessness: all migrating animals moving in vast hordes, 
as, for instance, the lemmings of the Arctic Circle, salmon, locusts, caterpillars, and, to a 
certain degree, migratory birds and mammals when moving er. masse, are inspired by an 
almost suicidal recklessness quite foreign to their normal adapted character 1 (Baynes, 
H. G.: Mythology of the Soul: A Research into the Unconscious from Schizophrenic Dreams 
and Dressings (London 1940, Bailliire, Tindall & Cox; 1949, Methuen), p. 460). 

* See pp. 106-453. »bove. * On pp. 277-80, above. 



•ONE MAN’S MEAT ANOTHER MAN’S POISON’ 535 
of the Roman Empire, the Syriac millet system was, as we have observed, 
a practical solution, worked out in response to experience, for the prob¬ 
lem presented to statesmanship by the geographical intermingling of 
different communities with one another. In ignoring the problem and 
attempting to iron the local Jewish millet out of existence by subjecting 
its members to political, economic, and psychological pressure of an in¬ 
human degree of severity, the rulers of Visigothia inflicted anguish on 
the Jews at the price of disgrace and eventual disaster for the bigot 
Power itself. 

The havoc worked by a nascent Western political ideology in a 
seventh-century Visigothia began to afflict the World outside the 
narrow West European homeland of Western Christendom after the 
opening of the Modern Age of Western history, when a puissant wave 
of Modern Western cultural influence carried with it into one quarter 
after another of the habitable surface of the planet a peculiar Western 
political ideology which was now keyed-up to an unprecedented pitch of 
fanatical intensity by the impact of the new spirit of Democracy upon 
the old Western institution of Territorial Sovereignty embodied in 
parochial states. 1 

For anyone who happened to have been born and brought up in 
Western Europe since the eruption of this Modem Western Democracy, 
the concept of Territorial Nationality was, no doubt, something self- 
evident. Every West European would be familiar with his own nation, 
and he would have little difficulty in defining it as being the population 
of a continuous and clearly demarcated block of territory whose inhabi¬ 
tants were united by the common possession of a distinctive social 
heritage and by a common membership in a single sovereign independent 
body politic in which this social heritage had found its political expres¬ 
sion. In the social heritage of a West European nation a common national 
language was apt to be one of the salient distinctive features; and, though 
this linguistic expression of nationality was not to be found in every 
West European nation’s cultural •make-up’, it counted for much, when 
it was present (as it usually was), in the evocation and the maintenance 
of a nation’s political consciousness. 

All this was taken for granted by West Europeans, simply because, in 
Western Europe, national heritages, including national languages, hap¬ 
pened for the most part to be distributed geographically in separate 
and severally self-contained blocks, on the pattern of a patchwork quilt, 
with the consequence that the local political allegiances of the peoples of 
Western Europe had crystallized, in the course of West European history, 
in this geographical formation. The political life of Western Europe 
had set hard on this locally not unnatural and, on the whole, not un¬ 
satisfactory basis before another combination of historical causes had 
happened to give these now national-minded peoples of Western 
Europe a temporary ascendancy over the rest of the World; and these 
two chains of historical development combined to invest a latter-day 
West European political institution with an imposing prestige in alien 
social milieux where this institution was not indigenous. These alien 
» See IV. iv. 156-67. 



536 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 

peoples admired, or at any rate envied, the Modern West Europeans’ 
political success, and they assumed that the distinctive West European 
political ideology of Nationalism had been the cause of it. The West 
European institution of the Parochial National State was taken by these 
politically less successful proselytes for a talisman that would automatic¬ 
ally confer political efficiency and power on any people who appro¬ 
priated it; and, with this simple-minded expectation, they hastened to 
adopt this West European Nationalism without pausing to consider 
whether the effect that it had produced in its native environment was 
likely to be reproduced in an alien social setting. 

This line of reasoning and action, of course, was not only naive but 
was fallacious on more than one account. In the first place the West 
European social setting which had given birth to the political ideal of 
Territorial Nationalism was a peculiar local milieu which was an excep¬ 
tion, not the rule, in the World as a whole. In Western Europe, where 
this Territorial Nationalism had originated, it was a natural dispensation 
in the sense that there it had been a spontaneous growth answering on 
the political plane to the underlying local pattern of human geography. 
In the second place the West European peoples had never been pedantic 
or fanatical in pushing this native and locally natural political ideal of 
theirs to extremes. The common sense of the West European peoples, 
as well as the abnormality of the West European social milieu, was one 
of the keys to an explanation of the contrast between the comparative 
innocuousness of the principle of Territorial Nationality in its West 
European home and the havoc that it worked when it was recklessly 
introduced into alien social milieux by proselytes who were condemned 
to be doctrinaires because they were following an exotic political theory 
whose practical application had never come within the range of their 
own ancestral experience. Since the linguistic aspect of West European 
Nationalism was the feature that leapt to an alien eye, the pedantry of 
these doctrinaire nationalists in partibus alienis fastened upon this, and, 
in doing so, made a most unfortunate departure from traditional West 
European native practice by finding the criterion of Nationality in the 
shibboleth of Language. 

We have indeed observed already in another context 1 that Modern 
Western Nationalism was comparatively innocuous in its West Euro¬ 
pean birthplace, where, for the most part, it took the political map as 
it found it, and was content to utilize the existing parochial states, 
within their established frontiers, as its crucibles for the decoction of its 
intoxicating political brew of psychic energy. Its noxious potentialities 
revealed themselves on alien ground where, so far from consecrating 
the frontiers which it found on the map, this aggressive exotic political 
ideology denounced them in the name of the explosive academic proposi¬ 
tion that all persons who happened to be speakers of this or that verna¬ 
cular language had a natural right to be united politically with one 
another in a single sovereign independent national state and therefore 
had a moral obligation to sacrifice their own and their neighbours’ wel¬ 
fare, happiness, and life itself in the pursuit of this pedantic political 

' In IV. iv. 185-90. 



‘ONE MAN’S MEAT ANOTHER MAN’S POISON’ 537 
programme. This linguistic interpretation—or caricature—of the West 
European ideology of Nationalism was never taken au pied de la lettre 
in the West European countries themselves, since here the external bond 
provided by community of speech was always recognized as being merely 
one among divers outward signs of an inward sense of political solidarity 
springing from common political experiences, institutions, and ideals. 

The national unity of the French nation, or the British nation, for 
instance, w'as not disrupted by the diversity of the French or English 
mother tongue of a majority of the citizens from the Celtic mother 
tongue of a minority in Brittany or Wales; and the centuries-old politi¬ 
cal association of the French-speaking inhabitants of the Val d’Aosta 
with the Italian-speaking inhabitants of Piedmont under the common 
rule of the House of Savoy 1 moved the Aostans on the morrow of the 
Second World War to opt in favour of continuing to be citizens of a 
defeated Italy, which they felt to be their mother country, in preference 
to becoming citizens of a France who had come out on the winning side 
and who was now appealing to them to join her on the strength of their 
common possession of the same mother tongue. Next door to the Val 
d’Aosta, in Switzerland, Western Europe offered the spectacle of a nation 
which had as lively a sense of national solidarity and individuality as any 
other nation in the Western World, and had preserved its national inde¬ 
pendence against all comers by showing an unwavering determination 
to defend it in arms, if necessary, by a levle en masse, though these 
diversely German, French, and Italian-speaking Swiss patriots had not 
any distinctive national language of their own to serve as an audible 
symbol of their distinctive national feeling. Switzerland was too hard a 
nut for Linguistic Nationalism to crack; and the golden opportunities 
for this travesty of a West European political idea to do its devil’s work 
presented themselves, beyond the confines of Nationalism’s West Euro¬ 
pean birthplace, in regions where political inexperience gave political 
pedantry a free hand. 

We have seen* how, in the course of the hundred years ending in 
a.d. 1918, Linguistic Nationalism disrupted a Danubian Hapsburg 
Monarchy which had been a marchmcn’s supra-national union sacree 
symbolized in a common allegiance to a dynasty charged with an oecu¬ 
menical mission to defend Western Christendom against Ottoman 
aggression. The revolutionary revision of the political map of Central 
Europe which swept the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy away be¬ 
stowed, in the act, the doubtful blessing of an ephemeral political 
liberation on the submerged peoples of a ci-devant United Kingdom of 
Poland-Lithuania which had been partitioned between the Hapsburg, 
Hohenzollcrn, and Romanov empires in the course of the last three 
decades of the eighteenth century. Poland-Lithuania had been the 
Hapsburg Monarchy’s neighbour and counterpart to the north of the 
Carpathians, where its mission had been to hold Western Christendom’s 
fourteenth-century conquests of Russian Orthodox Christian territory 
against the counter-attacks of an unconquercd interior of Russia whose 
formerly divided peoples had made it possible to redress the balance of 
« See IV. iv. 285. * In II. ii. 182-6. 



» 538 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
power between themselves and their aggressive Western neighbours by 
submitting to a unification of their parochial principalities into a 
Muscovite Russian universal state. 1 The Polish-Lithuanian United 
Kingdom which had once performed this anti-Muscovite task for 
Western Christendom had been, like the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy, 
an union sacree of marchmen which transcended the parochial loyalties 
of its component peoples; but these peoples had no sooner regained their 
political liberty through the outcome of the First World War than the 
demon of Linguistic Nationalism, which had made its sinister epiphany 
in the World during the period of their political eclipse, entered into 
them and drove them to perpetrate, within twenty years, the act of 
political suicide which it had taken the peoples of the Hapsburg 
Monarchy a hundred years to accomplish. 

After the collapse in a.d. 1918 of all the three East European Powers 
that had partitioned Poland-Lithuania in a.d. 1772-95. a mclagomaniac- 
ally imperialistic Polish aspiration to re-establish the frontiers of a.d. 
1772 2 as park-walls for a privileged Polish nation’s Lebensraum provoked 
a passionate resistance on the part of myopically parochial-minded 
Lithuanians and Ukrainians who had been the Poles’ partners and not 
the Poles’ subjects in the supra-national commonwealth that had been 
constituted in a.d. 1569 by the Treaty of Lublin. 5 In the carving out of 
an inter-war political map of Eastern Europe the Lithuanians succeeded 
in establishing a short-lived independence at the cost of losing to the 
Poles, by force of arms, the Jewish city and White Russian ‘corridor’ 
of Vilna, while the Uniate Catholic Ukrainians of Eastern Galicia and 
the Orthodox Christian Ukrainians of Volhynia were annexed to an 
inter-war Poland, by the same ephemerally victorious Polish force of 
arms, as subject and penalized minorities. Through the deadly feuds 
engendered by these tragic coups deforce that compromised the future of 
both Eastern Europe and the Western Civilization in the critical years a.d. 
1918-21, the evil spirit of Linguistic Nationalism prepared the way first 
for a fresh partition of the historic patrimony of Poland-Lithuania in 
a.d. 1939 between a Third German Reich and a Muscovy disguised as 
a Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and then for the establishment in 
a.d. 1945 of a Russian ascendancy over the whole of this demon-ridden 
area. 

1 See II. ii. 157-8 and 174-7; and pp. 126-8, 398-9, and 403, above. 

1 The Polish thesis that a nation which had come out on the winning side in the 
World War of A.D. 1914-18 was entitled to the frontiers of a.d. 1772 would have made a 
contemporary Englishman first rub his eyes and then burst out laughing when a con¬ 
sultation of Spruner-Menke’s historical atlas had reminded him that in a.d. 1772 one 
of the frontiers of the British Empire ran along the thalweg of the Mississippi. Yet, 
on the fantastic principle of Linguistic Nationalism, the Englishman’s title was a better 
one than his Polish contemporary’s, since in a.d. 1918 the Englishman’s mother tongue 
wag current in the United States not merely up to the line of the Mississippi but right 
across North America up to the Pacific coast, whereas the Pole’s mother tongue was 
current in a.d. 1018 in less than half the area that, in a.d. 1772, had been included within 
the frontiers of the United Kingdom of Poland-Lithuania. In a.d. 19x8 the larger part of 
this area was occupied by populations whose mother tongues were Lithuanian, White 
Russian, and Ukrainian, and these populations were duly claiming the right to possess 
sovereign states of their own, embracing the territories in which their respective lan¬ 
guages were prevalent. The indisputability of Great Britain's linguistic title to reannex 
the United States was Linguistic Nationalism's rcductio ad abiurdum. 

a See II. ii. 175. 



■ONE MAN’S MEAT ANOTHER MAN’S POISON’ 539 

This havoc worked by a Modem West European refinement of a tradi¬ 
tional Western ideology in the East European marches of the Western 
World was not so tragic as the devastating effect of the same Western 
virus of Nationalism in an Ottoman body politic, since neither the fatu¬ 
ously licensed anarchy that had been the bane of an eighteenth-century 
Poland-Lithuania nor the fitfully enlightened monarchy that had been 
the palladium of the Danubian Hapsburg Monarchy could compare 
with the Ottoman millet system in point of value as an alternative solu¬ 
tion for a common problem of finding a practicable political constitution 
for a commonwealth consisting of geographically intermingled com¬ 
munities which bore a greater resemblance to the trades and professions 
than to the territorially segregated nationalities of Western Europe. The 
Procrustean methods of barbarism by which the Ottoman millets were 
wrenched and hacked into the exotic shape of sovereign independent 
national states alia Franca, in the course of a century that opened with 
the extermination of the Moreot Muslims in a.d. 1821 and closed with 
the eviction of the Anatolian Orthodox Christians in a.d. 1922, have 
been noticed in a previous passage of this Part 1 which need not be re¬ 
capitulated here. In this place we have merely to point out that the no 
less shocking cruelties that accompanied the partition of a British Indian 
Empire into the two mutually hostile states of India and Pakistan, 1 and 
a British mandated territory of Palestine into the two mutually hostile 
states of Jordan and Israel, 3 on the morrow of a Second World War, 
were likewise examples of the destructively explosive effect of the 
Western ideology of Nationalism in social milieux in which geographi¬ 
cally intermingled communities had previously been enabled to live 
together in virtue of being organized in millets. 

The National State was not, of course, the only Modern Western 
political institution that had insinuated itself into the life of contem¬ 
porary non-Westem societies; the Enlightened Monarchy that had 
eventually been worsted by Linguistic Nationalism in the Danubian 
dominions of the Hapsburgs was another Western political institution 
that had also been a Western export in its day; and the secular-minded 
Weltanschauung which this Late Modern Western form of autocracy had 
brought in its train had anticipated the subsequent ravages of National¬ 
ism in the subversiveness of the effects that it had produced when it had 
run amok in a post-Petrine Russia. 

‘The influence of the West upon Russia was absolutely paradoxical; it 
did not graft Western criteria upon the Russian spirit. On the contrary 
its influence let loose violent, Dionysiac, dynamic, and sometimes de¬ 
moniac forces. Spirits were unshackled and revealed a dynamic force 
unknown in the period before Peter. The limitless aspirations of the Faus¬ 
tian Man of the West, the man who belongs to modern history, in Russia 
revealed themselves in an entirely peculiar way, in their own distinctive 
manner, and found expression in the creations of Dostoyevsky’s genius. 
The Russia which had been inherited from the past, the Russia of the 
nobility, of the merchant class and the shop-keepers, which the period 
of empire had kept in being, came into conflict with the Russia of the 

1 On pp. 189-92, above. * See p. 204, above. 

3 See pp. 290-2, above. 



54 © AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 

intelligentsia, 1 which was revolutionary and social-revolutionary in spirit, 
which aspired after the infinite and sought the City which is to come. 
This clash let loose dynamic forces and led to explosions. At the time 
when, in the West, enlightenment and culture were establishing a sort of 
order in accordance with fixed standards—although, of course, a relative 
order—in Russia enlightenment and culture overthrew standards, obli¬ 
terated boundaries, and evoked a revolutionary dynamic.’ 2 

In another context 1 we have taken a glance at the history of the Laic 
Modern Western institution of Enlightened Monarchy which was to 
produce these demonically explosive effects when it was let loose in 
Russia without the accompaniment of those salutary checks and balances 
that had kept this dispensation in order in the Western World; and we 
have traced the origins of this secular form of Western autocracy back to 
an ideology with which a Medieval Western Christendom was indoctri¬ 
nated by the Emperor Frederick II Hohcnstaufcn. In the same context 
we have seen that this necromantic medieval renaissance, on Western 
ground, of a post-Constantinian Hellenic ideal of autocracy was not a 
feat of Western sorcery. The spirit of Caesaropapism that captivated 
Frederick II’s soul was not a revenant evoked from Western Christen¬ 
dom’s own dead Hellenic past; it was an intruder breaking in from the 
living world of an Orthodox Christian Society that was Western 
Christendom’s contemporary and sister; and the magician who had 
succeeded in reanimating this Late Hellenic autocracy in Orthodox 
Christendom was not the thirteenth-century Swabian prince of an 
East Roman Empire’s Apulo-Sicilian successor-state, but was the East 
Roman Empire’s own eighth-century founder, Leo Syrus. Leo’s effective 
revival of Justinian’s autocracy was a Byzantine culture-element which 
made its way into a thirteenth-century Western Christendom via Sicily 
and Apulia; and, coming, as it did, in isolation from its Byzantine cul¬ 
tural setting into an alien body social organized on a different cultural 
pattern, it produced in partibus Occidentis an explosive effect which it 
had never produced in an Eastern Orthodox Christian World. 

The crux lay in the impossibility of making room in a thirteenth- 
century Western World for this intrusive Byzantine ghost of a latter-day 
Hellenic institution without pushing to the wall a Hildebrandine Papal 
hierocracy which, by Frederick II Hohenstaufen’s day, was not merely 
a going concern in the West but had come to be Western Christendom’s 
master institution. In an earlier Part of this Study 4 w-e have already had 
occasion to watch the tragic spectacle of the self-destruction of the 
Medieval Western Christian order of society through a war to the knife 
between the Holy Roman Empire and the Papacy that was precipitated 
by the Stupor Mundi 's attempt to bewitch the Western World of his 
day with his Byzantine political enormity. In the present place we need 
only remind ourselves that this thirteenth-century internecine struggle 
had had a twelfth-century overture, and that a conflict in which the 

1 The origins, <thos, and significance of this unhappy social product of encounters 
between contemporaries have been examined in this Study in V. v. 154-9.—A.J.T. 

2 The Origin of Rustian Communism (London 1037, Bles). pp. 08-00. 

1 In VII. vu. 537-9. See further X. ix. 9-14. 

4 In IV. iv. 537, 540, and 560-7- 



•ONE MAN’S MEAT ANOTHER MAN'S POISON’ 541 
Papacy had joined forces with the North Italian city-states to resist 
Frederick II's grandfather and namesake had been precipitated by 
Barbarossa’s own impolitic adoption of the same exotic ideal of auto¬ 
cracy when this revolutionary departure from the native practice of the 
feudal monarchies of Barbarossa’s own world had been suggested to 
a restlessly ambitious Medieval Western mind by the impressive image 
of a Late Roman Emperor’s prerogatives in the mirror of a recently 
disinterred Justiniancan Corpus Iuris . 1 

The destructive potentialities that culture-elements are apt to display 
when they have been torn out of their original framework and been 
introduced into an alien social milieu are also illustrated by examples 
on the economic plane which are as striking as the political episodes 
that we have just been surveying. An observer of human affairs in the 
twentieth century of the Christian Era could not look around him with¬ 
out perceiving that the malaise that met his eyes everywhere had been 
produced by the radiation of Modern Western economic techniques as 
well as Modern Western political institutions. The demoralizing effect 
of an imported Western Industrialism was particularly conspicuous in 
South-East Asia, where an exotic industrial revolution, speeded-up by 
the forced draught of importunate Western economic enterprise, had 
produced a geographical mixture of socially still unannealed communities 
in the process of gathering the human fuel for its economic furnace. 

'Everywhere in the Modern World economic forces have strained the 
relations between Capital and Labour, Industry and Agriculture, Town 
and Country; but in the Modem East the strain is greater because of a 
corresponding cleavage along racial lines. . . . The foreign Oriental is not 
merely a buffer between European and native but a barrier between the 
native and the Modem World. The cult of efficiency merely built up a 
monumental Western skyscraper on Eastern soil, with the natives in the 
basement; all inhabited the same country, but the building was of a differ¬ 
ent world, the Modern World to which the native had no access. In this 
plural economy competition is much keener than in the Western World. 
“There is materialism, rationalism, individualism, and a concentration on 
economic ends, far more complete and absolute than in homogeneous 
Western lands; a total absorption in the exchange and market, a capitalist 
world with the business concern as subject, far more typical of Capitalism 
than one can imagine in the so-called capitalist countries, which have 
grown slowly out of the past and arc still bound to it by a hundred roots .” 1 
.... Thus, although these several dependencies have in appearance been 
remodelled along Western lines, they have in fact been remodelled as 
economic systems, for production and not for social life. The mediaeval 
state has, quite suddenly, been converted into a modem factory '.’ 3 

An intrusive exotic culture-element’s potency for working havoc is 
raised to its maximum when this cultural arrowhead is not only detached 
from its original setting and launched as a free lance into an alien body 

1 See VI. vii. 265-8; VII. vii. 538-9; and X. ix. 9. 

: Boeke, Dr. J. H.: ‘Dc Economische Thcoric dcr Dualistischc Samenlcving’, in De 
Economist, 1035, p. 781. 

J Furnivall, J. S.: Progress and Welfare in Southeast Asia (New York 1941, Secretariat, 
Institute of Pacific Relations), pp. 42-44- The picture drawn in outline in the passage 
just quoted is amplified ibid., pp. 61-63. 



542 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
social but is also transferred, in the act, from one plane of human activity 
to another. The devastating effect of a Modern Western industrialism 
imported into the economic life of South-East Asia was not so severe, 
subversive though it was, as the effect of a Eurasian Nomad Pastoralism 
imported into the life of a sedentary society and diverted in this alien 
milieu from its proper economic function of tending live-stock to the 
incongruous political enterprise of improvising a regime for the govern¬ 
ment of human beings. The policy of treating a conquered sedentary 
population as human sheep to be shepherded with the aid of marvellously 
trained human sheep-dogs, which is an obviously natural recourse for 
a Nomad empire-builder in partibus agricolarum, is, of course, a 
grotesquely preposterous outrage in the eyes of this pastor’s sedentary 
victims; and for this reason the lives of such Nomad empires on culti¬ 
vated ground had, as we have seen , 1 usually been short. 

The relative longevity of the Ottoman Empire is the exception that 
proves this rule ; 1 and the ‘Osmanli Turkish Eurasian Nomad con¬ 
querors of the main body of Orthodox Christendom succeeded in 
obtaining this exceptionally long lease of their human sheep-run partly 
because, in this case, the conversion of a pastoral economic technique 
into an instrument of government was carried out with a rare vision and 
skill by shepherd-kings who were also men of genius , 3 and partly be¬ 
cause the sedentary society whose domain the Ottoman patriarchs 
happened to overrun had previously fallen into such a desperate state 
of anarchy, and had proved so hopelessly incompetent to put its own 
house in order, that this grievously sick main body of Orthodox Christen¬ 
dom was constrained to purchase peace even at the almost prohibitively 
high price of submitting to a Pax Ottomanica* The exorbitancy of the 
price can be measured by the intensity of the odium which the ‘Osmanlis 
incurred by their inhuman performance of an indispensable social 
service . 5 


(fi) ‘One Thing Leads to Another' 

Our second ‘law’ of cultural radiation-and-reception 6 is the tendency 
of a culture-pattern that has established itself in an emitting body social 
to reassert itself in a receiving body social through a reassemblage and 
reunion there of constituent culture-elements that have come to be 
divorced from one another in the process of transmission. This nisus 
towards reintegration has to contend with the opposing tendency of an 
assaulted society to resist the penetration of alien culture-elements and 
to admit them, if it must, only in the smallest possible quantities and at 
the slowest possible rate . 7 Accordingly, even when some single intrusive 
alien element has succeeded in opening a way for its original associates 
to follow and rejoin it, the tension between the pioneer trespasser’s 
constant pull and the invaded body social’s no less constant resistance 
constrains the pathfinder’s old comrades, in bringing up their re¬ 
inforcements, to travel in Indian file, to make their entry one by one, 


1 In III. iii. pp. 23-25. 
4 Sec ibid., pp. 26-27. 
6 See p. 530, above. 


1 See ibid., pp. 27-50. 

* See V. v. 348. 

7 See pp. 508-21, above. 


* Sec ibid., p. 26. 



'ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER’ 543 
and therefore to make it, as the pathfinder element has made it in 
advance, each in isolation from its pristine cultural context. 

As we watch this arduous process of infiltration making a headway 
that carries it to the bitter end of introducing the whole besieging host of 
Midian inside a beleaguered Israel’s defences, the astonishing aspect of 
this excruciating miracle is not, of course, the needle’s obstructiveness 
of the camel’s importunity; it is the camel’s feat of negotiating his 
passage piecemeal through the needle’s eye . 1 The assaulted body social’s 
resistance to the painful and disruptive intrusion of alien culture- 
elements can be taken as a matter of course. What requires explanation 
is the invariably recurring failure of the defence at each successive 
repetition of the attack, when the defence has achieved the initial tactical 
success of compelling the assailant to disperse his forces and to dribble them 
into action one by one instead of throwing in all of them simultaneously 
en masse. When the assailant has thus been constrained to deploy his 
troops in an order—or disorder—which is the most uneconomical way of 
using his strength according to the classical theory of war, how is it 
that one driblet after another actually succeeds in forcing its way through 
the breach? What is the stimulus that gives each assaulting soldier in his 
turn the hardihood to engage in single combat and the prowess to win 
his isolated way through to his, and his comrades’, common objective? 
And whence comes the prodigious discipline that prompts soldiers who 
have had to break the ranks in the act of delivering their assault to per¬ 
form the tour de force of falling once more into their original formation 
when their Han has carried them all successively into the enemy’s castle- 
yard through a crevice in the curtain-wall that is too narrow to give 
entry to more than one soldier at a time ? 

The explanation of this miracle would appear to be that the two alter¬ 
native possible states—a state of integration and a state of disaggregation 
—in which any given set of culture-elements may be found , 2 are not on 
a par with one another in point of naturalness, normality, and healthiness. 
If an integral ray of cultural radiation that has been diffracted into its 
constituent elements in process of transmission from one body social 
to another shows a tendency to reconstitute itself into its original pattern 
after it has achieved the penetration of an obstacle which it has had to 
penetrate piecemeal, does not this tendency towards reintegration signify 
that the relatively complex state in which the primary culture-elements 
constitute an integrated pattern is in some sense more natural, more 
normal, and more healthy than the relatively simple state in which each 
of the primary culture-elements goes its own separate way without 
there being any mutual relation of reciprocity and interdependence 
between any one element and the rest ? 

If a mutual attraction towards combining to constitute a culture- 
pattern is a natural property of culture-elements which normally holds 
its own against a counter-tendency towards a spontaneous dissolution 
of their partnership , 1 this would account for a tendency to recombine 
when the partnership has been dissolved forcibly by the disruptive pro¬ 
cess of diffraction, and we should have put our finger here upon an 

1 Matt. xix. 24. 2 See pp. 495-501, above. > See p. 498, above. 



544 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
explanation of the impulse that moves the elemental rays of a diffracted 
integral ray of cultural radiation to follow one another through any 
breach in the defences of an assaulted body social into which any one 
of their number has once pushed its way, and to reassociate with one 
another in their original formation when they have completed their re¬ 
assemblage on the farther side of a cultural Maginot Line which they 
have carried by means of a succession of individual assaults. 

If this gregarious instinct that thus seems to be inherent in the nature 
of a primary culture-element is as deep-seated and as dynamic as the 
evidence indicates, this in turn would explain an apparent paradox in 
the assaulted party's usual reaction to the aggressor’s attack. The usual 
course of an encounter between contemporaries in which the assailant’s 
forlorn hope has once made a lodgement within the assaulted party’s 
defences is a mechanical resolution of the opposing forces at work in the 
tension between the intrusive elements’ successful efforts in a winning 
battle to rejoin one another and the invaded society’s unsuccessful efforts 
in a losing battle to keep each and all of the intrusive elements at arm’s 
length; and this ineffectual kicking against the pricks in a struggle of 
which the outcome is a foregone conclusion defeats the recalcitrant 
victim’s intentions and falsifies his expectations 1 by producing the 
untoward result of ensuring that his inevitable sufferings shall be of a 
maximum severity. It ensures, in fact, that the agonizing social and 
spiritual cancer started by the successful lodgement of the first single 
pioneer intrusive culture-element shall take, when once started, the 
longest possible time to run its dreadful course; and that, throughout 
this maximum Time-span, the devastating process of cultural invasion 
shall be perpetually extending its range and accentuating its effect in the 
invaded society’s tormented body social . 2 

At first thoughts an observer of this strange tragedy might perhaps 
have expected that the painfulness of the initial experience of invasion 
by an exotic culture-element would have provided its own remedy by 
impelling the patient to make sure that this initial invasion should have 

> See III. iii. 152 . 

2 This Utter rule is subject to exceptions which may occur if and when, after the act 
of cultural penetration has taken place, but before it has made any considerable progress, 
the impinging society disintegrates to a degree at which it becomes impotent to carry 
its cultural invasion of the assaulted alien body social any farther. If this situation arises, 
it offers to the aggressor society’s victim a chance of giving a distinctive turn of its own 
to those elements of the exotic culture that have succeeded in making a lodgement in 
its body by that time. Classical cases in point arc the histories of the Russian branch of 
an Onhodox Christendom and the Japanese branch of the Far F.astem Civilization. The 
Russian and Japanese converts to these two civilizations had been mere barbarians at 
the time of their conversion, and might therefore have been expected a priori to be more 
docile in their adoption of the invading exotic way of life than, for example, the Celtic 
or the Scandinavian converts to the Western Christian Civilization, who, before their 
conversion, had created at least the rudiments of distinctive civilizations of their own. 
Russian and Japanese history took a different turn from this because the main bodies of 
the Onhodox Christian and the For Eastern Society broke down and went into dis¬ 
integration at a time when their branches—which had struck root in the ground of 
Russia and Japan like the drooping branches of a banyan tree—were still tender shoots. 
The Russian branch of Orthodox Christendom and the Japanese branch of the Far 
Eastern Civilization did duly show their solidarity with their parent stems to the extent 
of following them into decline; but they went on to assert a distinctive cultural indi¬ 
viduality of their own by the dismal process of going through a disintegrating civiliza- 
tions normal experiences of a Time of Troubles and a universal state on independent 
lines. 



‘ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER’ 545 
no sequel. When a child has burnt its fingers, we should expect it to 
stop playing with fire. Why was it, then, that, in the classical examples 
presented by those encounters with the West which all the living non- 
Wcstern societies had been experiencing in the Modern Age of Western 
history, every victim of the Modern Western Civilization’s cultural 
radioactivity which had once allowed some importunate Western tech¬ 
nique, institution, or idea to gain a foothold within the non-Western 
victim’s defences should invariably have gone on to give admission to 
one further Western culture-element after another, in spite of the 
suffering and loss that this piecemeal reception of alien elements had 
brought with it from the start ? The truth in all these cases is, of course, 
that the victim was not courting a maximum experience of torment 
deliberately, but was incurring it through force majeure. In falling back 
from one position to another, he was not making a masterly retreat 
according to plan; he was helplessly ‘on the run’. 

Assaulted societies are not always blind to the consequences that are 
likely to follow from allowing even the most apparently trivial and 
innocuous exotic culture-clement to make an entry. We have already 
taken note 1 of certain historic encounters in which an assaulted society 
has succeeded in repulsing its assailant’s attack without having given him 
a chance of making even a temporary lodgement; and an uncompromis¬ 
ing policy of self-insulation that has won these rare victories has also 
been tried in many other cases where it has proved a failure. This policy 
is the practical expression of a spirit of ‘Zealotism’ which is, as we shall 
see, 2 one of the alternative possible psychological responses to the 
challenge of a cultural assault; and, while a ‘Zealot’s’ characteristic fithos 
is emotional and intuitive, there have also been ‘Zealots’ who have been 
led to adopt a policy of isolationism by a train of reasoning from an 
empirical discovery of the truth that cultural intercourse is governed by 
the social law that ‘one thing leads to another’. A classic case of this 
rationalist variety of ‘Zealotism’ is the severance of relations between 
Japan and the Western World that was gradually carried through, after 
careful investigation and mature reflexion at every stage, by Hideyoshi 
and his Tokugawan successors in the course of the fifty-one years ending 
in a.d. 1638. It is more surprising to find a similar awareness of the in¬ 
herent interdependence of all the divers elements in an intrusive alien 
culture-pattern leading, by a similar train of reasoning, to a similar con¬ 
clusion in the mind of an old-fashioned ruler of a secluded and backward 
Arab country. 

The rationalist ‘Zealot’s’ state of mind is piquantly illustrated by a con¬ 
versation which took place in the nineteen-twenties between the Zaydl 
Im 5 m Yahya of San'a and a British envoy whose mission was to persuade 
the Imam to restore peacefully a portion of the British Aden Protector¬ 
ate which he had occupied during the World War of a.d. 1914-18 and 
had refused to evacuate thereafter, notwithstanding the defeat of his 
Ottoman overlords. In a final interview with the Im 5 m, after it had be¬ 
come apparent that the mission would not attain its object, the British 
envoy, wishing to give the conversation another turn, complimented 
* On pp. 476-7, above. 2 On pp. 581-2, below. 


S46 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
the Im 5 m upon the soldierly appearance of his new-model army. Seeing 
that the Imam took the compliment in good part, he went on: 

‘And I suppose you will be adopting other Western institutions as well ?’ 

‘I think not,’ said the Imam with a smile. 

‘Oh, really? That interests me. And may I venture to ask your reasons ?’ 

‘Well, I don’t think I should like other Western institutions,’ said the 
Imam. 

‘Indeed? And what institutions, for example?’ 

‘Well, there are parliaments,’ said the Imam. ‘I like to be the Govern¬ 
ment myself. I might find a parliament tiresome.’ 

‘Why, as for that,’ said the Englishman, 'I can assure you that respon¬ 
sible parliamentary representative government is not an indispensable 
part of the apparatus of our Western Civilization. Look at Italy. She has 
given that up, and she is one of the great Western Powers.’ 

‘Well, then there is alcohol,’ said the Imam. 'I don’t want to see that 
introduced into my country, where at present it is happily almost un¬ 
known.’ 

‘Very natural,’ said the Englishman; ‘but, if it comes to that, I can 
assure you that alcohol is not an indispensable adjunct of Western Civiliza¬ 
tion cither. Look at America. She has given up that, and she too is one of 
the great Western Powers.’ 

‘Well, anyhow,’ said the Irndm, with another smile which seemed to 
intimate that the conversation was at an end, ‘I don’t like parliaments and 
alcohol and that kind of thing’ 

The Englishman could not make out whether there was any suggestion 
of humour in the parting smile with which the Im 5 m’s last words were 
uttered; but, however that might be, those words went to the heart of 
the matter and showed that the inquiry about possible further Western 
innovations at San ‘5 had been more pertinent than the Imam might 
have cared to admit. Those words indicated, in fact, that the Imam, 
viewing the Western Civilization from a great way off, saw it, in that 
distant perspective, as something one and indivisible and recognized 
certain features of it which to a Westerner’s eye would appear to have 
nothing whatever to do with one another—the West’s addiction to 
alcoholic beverages and its addiction to parliamentary institutions—as 
being organically related parts of that indivisible whole. 

The moral of this story is that, in manifesting the perspicacity of his 
intellectual insight, the Imam YahyJ had implicitly indicted the infirmity 
of his purpose. In revealing his cognizance of the social ‘law’ that, in 
cultural intercourse, ‘one thing leads to another’, he had tacitly admitted 
that, in wcak-mindedly abandoning his own principles to the extent of 
adopting even just the rudiments of a Western military technique, he had 
already introduced into the life of his people the thin end of a wedge 
which in time would inexorably cleave their close-compacted traditional 
Islamic Civilization asunder. He had started a cultural revolution which 
would leave the Yamanites, in the end, with no alternative but to cover 
their nakedness with a complete ready-made outfit of Western clothes. 

If the Imam had met his Hindu contemporary the Mahatma Gandhi, 
that is what he would have been told by a Hindu statesman-saint who 
could have spoken with the double authority of genius and experience. 



•ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER’ 547 
The moral which the Imam YahyS had failed or refused to draw had been 
duly drawn by Gandhi, with his seer’s eye, from his own divination of 
the inherent tendency of diffracted culture-elements to reassemble in 
their pristine formation. Gandhi had understood that an assaulted 
society which intended to strive in earnest for the preservation of its 
cultural integrity could not afford to make one single concession to its 
assailant—not even the clever-seeming feint of yielding so far as to adopt 
the aggressor’s military technique with a view to thus enabling itself to 
mount a counter-offensive on less unequal terms. Such purposive 
feigned retreats were apt, the Mahatma perceived, to degenerate into 
routs that were as genuine as they were involuntary; and accordingly 
Gandhi exhorted the Hindu Society of his day to cut the threads binding 
it to the Western World by renouncing, not only the importation from 
Great Britain, but also, even more firmly, the still more gravely com¬ 
promising manufacture in India, of machine-made cotton yam and 
cotton cloth. 1 

In calling upon his fellow Hindus to revert to spinning and weaving 
their cotton by hand, Gandhi was indeed showing them the way to 
extricate themselves from the visible meshes of a Western economic 
spider’s web; but this Gandhian policy of total economic divorce from 
the West was based on two assumptions which must both be justified in 
the event if the policy was to achieve its aim; and neither of these 
assumptions actually proved able to stand this searching test of experi¬ 
ence. The first assumption was that the Hindus of Gandhi’s generation 
would be prepared to make the economic sacrifices demanded by the 
Gandhian prescription for purchasing immunity from a Western cul¬ 
tural virus, and on this point the Hindu prophet failed to carry his 
people with him. The Hindu masses could not bear to condemn them¬ 
selves to a self-imposed depression of their material standard of living 
below its present abysmal nadir, while the Hindu textile manufacturers 
at Bombay and at Gandhi’s second home, Ahmadabad, would not forgo 
the profits which they were earning by the mass-production of cheap 
cotton goods. Since the party funds of the Indian Congress were largely 
provided by free-will offerings of a fraction of these profits of Indian 
industry alia Franca, Gandhi’s policy was virtually doomed to defeat; 2 
but, even if Gandhi had not been disappointed in his high expectations 
of his countrymen’s economic disinterestedness, his policy would still 
have been brought to naught by the falsity of its second implicit assump¬ 
tion, which was not a miscalculation of the assaulted society’s moral 
capacity, but was a misapprehension of the intrusive alien culture’s 
spiritual quality. 

The error in Gandhi’s diagnosis here was that in this context he was 
allowing himself to see nothing more in the Late Modern Western 
Civilization than the secular social structure, with Technology substi¬ 
tuted for Religion as the key-stone of the social arch, which the West in 
Gandhi’s day self-complacently proclaimed itself to be. If the cultural 
radiation, emanating from the West, that was bombarding India in 
Gandhi’s day had been in truth exclusively technological in its texture, 

» See III. iii. 190 . 1 See III. iii. 203. 



548 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
then Gandhi’s policy of rendering the Hindu body social totally im¬ 
pervious to penetration by technological culture-rays of Western pro¬ 
venance might have proved an effective solution of the Hindu Society’s 
Western problem, supposing that Gandhi had been successful in 
securing his people’s effective support in this campaign. The baffling 
feature to which Gandhi seems—to judge by his policy—to have been 
blind in his scrutiny of contemporary Western cultural phenomena was 
the political and spiritual corona that was playing round the fringe of 
a self-eclipsed cultural sun’s perversely darkened disk. This irrepressible 
khvarenah 1 continued to bear visual witness to the truth that spiritual 
suicide is not an easy crime to commit ; 2 and it is the more strange that 
Gandhi, of all men, should have been blind to this portent, seeing that 
these clouds of Western glory had demonstrated their radioactive 
potency ad hominem by gathering round the Hindu prophet’s own head 
and illuminating his own heart. 

Gandhi’s masterly use of contemporary Western methods of political 
organisation, publicity, and propaganda 3 to serve his campaign against 
the compromising use of Western methods of economic production 
might perhaps be dismissed as one of the ironic curiosities of history; 
but an open-eyed and candid-minded observer, Occidental or Hindu, 
could hardly refuse to take seriously the manifest conquest of Gandhi’s 
soul by the undying spirit of a Christianity which had been repudiated 
by a majority of its Late Modern Western carriers. The spiritual event 
that had liberated Gandhi’s creative ‘soul-force’ was an encounter, in the 
sanctuary of this sublime Hindu soul, between the spirit of Hinduism 
and the spirit of the Christian Gospel embodied in the life of the 
Society of Friends . 4 A cultural barrage designed to keep out the power- 
loom was no obstacle to the entry of the Inner Light; and the captivation 
of Gandhi’s soul by an alien culture on the religious plane was as decisive 
as it was auspicious. 

The truth is that, if once the besieged have permitted even one isolated 
member of the besiegers’ storming column to force his way inside their 
enceinte, their only remaining chance of saving their fortress from 
ultimately falling is to take the intruder prisoner before any of his 
eagerly following comrades-in-arms have had time to rejoin and re- 

* 'Hallowed by the halo of the Khvarenah' might perhaps be the common meaning of 

the Hittitc word kouimanat denoting a client prince of a Hittite emperor who styled 

himself ‘the Sun’ (see Delaporte, L.: Lei Hittites (Paris 1936, La Renaissance du Livre), 
p. 187), the Greek words xoipavos and Kopiov oy {Maudomci Kdpavot: sec I. i. 400, n. 1), 
and the Persian word xdpavos, which, according to Xenophon, Htlltnica. Book I, chap, iv, 

§ 3, was the official title borne by Cyrus the Younger as viceroy of an Anatolian military 
district of the Achnemeninn Empire (See VI. vii. 183, n. 7, and VI. vii. 673-4). Did this 
Persian title survive in the family name of the House of Kirin, which, under the 
Arsacid and Sasanid regimes, ranked as the second family in the Empire after the 
reigning dynasty itself? And, if Kirin stands for napaws, does Suren stand for s eren 
(Groeci rvpavyos), the title given to 'the Lords of the Philistines’ in the Hebrew text of 
the Old Testament? (Sec Macalister, R. A. S.: The Philistines (London 1913, Milford), 
P- 79 >- 

2 'Just as the corona asserts the fact that the Sun is not actually engulfed but only 
darkened, so there arc certain marginal events or intuitions which inform the individual, 
temporarily engulfed by the Unconscious, that the light of Consciousness will emerge 
again’ (Baynes, H. G.: Mythology 0/ the Soul (London 1940, Bailliirc, Tindall & Cox; 
1949, Methuen), p. 557 ). 

J See III. ui. 203. * * * § Sec III. iii. 190-1 and V. v. 190. 



'ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER’ 549 
inforce the audacious pioneer. An intrusive alien culture-element cannot 
easily be purged of its dangerous capacity for attracting to itself other 
elements, of the same provenance, with which it was associated in its 
original cultural setting. The rash recipient’s only chance of demagnetiz¬ 
ing his formidable acquisition is to metabolize and assimilate it to a 
degree at which it becomes amenable to being worked into his native 
cultural pattern as an enrichment and not a dissolvent of the prevailing 
harmony. If the intrusive alien element succeeds in defeating the opera¬ 
tions of its host’s digestive system by retaining its magnetic alien quality 
after lodgement, the unhappy host will find himself condemned to look 
on helplessly while the defiantly intrusive culture-element behaves in his 
body social like a loose electron disintegrating an atom or like a cuckoo’s 
egg laid in a hedge-sparrow’s nest . 1 

The changeling chick into which this alien egg hatches out provides 
for the satisfaction of its own inordinate appetite by insisting on its 
foster parents’ making this the first call on their energies, at the expense 
of their duty to their own brood; and the ruthless interloper makes room 
in the diminutive nest for its own disproportionately expanding body by 
throwing its foster-brothers out, one by one, until a nest which the 
parent hedge-sparrows have built for the rearing of their own young has 
been turned by the presence of the intruder into an incubator for pro¬ 
pagating the absentee parent cuckoos’ species through the hoodwinked 
and brow-beaten hedge-sparrows’ misguided ministrations. At this far- 
gone stage in the lamentable game the parent hedge-sparrows are con¬ 
strained to acquiesce in the servitude of foster-parenthood as the one 
mission in life still open to them—even though their one foster-chick 
happens to be the murderer of their own progeny. 

In general terms of encounters between civilizations, this is to say 
that, when the assaulted party has failed to prevent even one single 
pioneer element of the aggressively radioactive culture from making a 
lodgement in his body social, and when he has furthermore failed to 
isolate and sterilize this alien entering wedge by metabolizing and 
assimilating it, his only chance of social survival lies in making a psycho¬ 
logical volte face. He may still be able to save himself alive by abandoning 
the ‘Zealot’ attitude of tooth-and-nail opposition to an irresistible in¬ 
vader’s inexorable advance and adopting, instead, the ‘Herodian’s’ 
opposite tactics 2 of learning to fight a militarily superior adversary with 
his own weapons, as a prelude to winning his goodwill by welcoming 
him with open arms. In the particular terms of the encounter between 
the ‘Osmanlis and the Late Modern West the moral would be that 
Sultan ‘Abd-al-Hamld’s grudging policy of Westernization at a mini¬ 
mum was never practical politics when once the invading Western 
culture had forced its way through the Porte and entrenched itself in the 
Ottoman Imperial Government’s war department , 3 whereas Mustafa 
Kemal Ataturk’s whole-hearted policy of Westernization to a maximum 4 
offered the ‘Osmanlis a just practicable way of salvation even when adopted 
as a last resort at the eleventh hour. 


1 Sec the instances cited in V. vi. 106-7. 
J See pp. 234-6, above. 


2 See pp. 582-4, below. 
* See pp. 263-8, above. 


550 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 

The Ottoman and the Russian Society’s experiences in their en¬ 
counters with a Late Modem Western Civilization afford classical 
illustrations of the incfficacy of the principle of homoeopathic medicine 
when the virus to which the patient is trying to make himself immune is 
a cultural infection. Peter the Great in Russia, Mehmed 'All in Egypt, 
and Mahmud II in Turkey each in turn began by setting himself the 
limited objective of Westernizing his fighting forces in order to be able 
to hold his own militarily and diplomatically in a Westernizing World; 
and in each case the act of self-inoculation with a serum extracted from 
the contemporary Western art of war, so far from conferring the hoped- 
for immunity, started a galloping consumption. In Melimed ‘All’s 
Egypt the potency of a Westernized army’s contagious cultural effect in 
promoting the Westernization of the rest of the body social was recog¬ 
nized in retrospect by an able British observer when Mehmed ‘All had 
been master of Egypt for a third of a century. 

‘At an early period of his military career, Mahomet Ali saw enough to 
convince him of the superiority of European tactics over those of the East; 
for he was himself engaged against the French Army in Egypt, and con¬ 
ceived a high opinion of the value of martial science. But the introduction 
of Western organisation into the armies of the Levant brought with it 
other important results; for the appliances of mechanical art.of education, 
of medical knowledge, and a general system of dependence and subordina¬ 
tion, were the needful companions of the new state of things. The transfer 
of the military power from unruly and undisciplined hordes to a body of 
troops regularly trained through the various grades of obedience and 
discipline was in itself the establishment of a principle of order which 
spread over the whole surface of Society . 1 

In Egypt, Turkey, and Russia alike the sequel to the Westernization of 
the fighting forces from above downwards by an autocrat’s fiat demon¬ 
strated that this new departure in the military field could not be followed 
out effectively to its own intendedly limited objective unless it were also 
followed up and supported by a series of further new departures, in 
the same Westernizing direction, in other departments of social life. 

A fighting force of the genuine Late Modern Western quality could 
not be brought into being without provision for the professional training 
of a corps of officers in accordance with the Western standard of the 
day , 2 and it could not be kept in being without provision for a medical 

1 Bowring, John: Report on Egypt and Candia dated the 27th March, 1839, and 
addressed to the Right Hon. Lord Viscount Palmerston (London 1840, Clowes & 
Clowes), p. 49. This British visitor’s judgement was confirmed by the contemporary 
testimony of the French physician A. B. Clot, who had spent fifteen years of his working 
life in Mehmed 'All's service (see his Aperfu Gintral stir VEgypte (Paris 1840, Fortin 
and Masson, 2 vols.), vol. i, p. vi). Clot Bey’s dictum (ibid., vol. ii. p. 199) that in Egypt, 
as Mehmed 'Alt found it, 'tout dtait a fairc, ct tout a commence a *tre fait i la suite de 
l’organi ration militnjre', has been quoted already on p. 234, above. In the same pas¬ 
sage, Clot Bey credits his Rumeliot Turkish employer’s new model army alia Franca 
with the two particular achievements of having created order in Egypt and having in¬ 
spired the native Egyptians with a national consciousness. 

1 In Mehmed ‘Ali s new-model army there was a systematic provision for the general 
education of the conscripts in the ranks during their perioji of service (Bowring, j.: 
Report on the Commercial Statistics 0] Syria, dated the 17th July, 1839 (London 1840, 
Clowes), p. 109), as well as a preparatory system of professional education for officer- 
cadets. 



‘ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER’ 551 
service to look after the physical welfare of the rank-and-file of a stand¬ 
ing army or navy living at close quarters under unnatural conditions . 1 
It proved impossible, however, as we have seen,* to confine the Western 
education of military and naval officers in a non-Western society to a pro¬ 
fessionally indispensable minimum of technical instruction when their 
autocratic master was so unintelligent as to be able to delude himself, 
first, into imagining that it would be within his power thus to blinker 
the mental vision of his cadets and then into flattering himself that the 
robot human product of his fancy would have been capable—had it been 
possible for him to produce it in real life—of fulfilling its professional 
mission of holding its own against the less illiberally educated officers’ 
corps of Western or Westernizing neighbours. 

We have noticed the nemesis by which Sultan ‘Abd-al-Hamid II’s 
delusion was overtaken and confuted in a.d. 1908 when a political revolu¬ 
tion that cost him his throne was led by junior officers who had acquired 
their ‘dangerous thoughts’ at this fatuously unenlightened Ottoman 
despot’s painfully sterilized military academy. It is more surprising to 
find military officers leading abortive political revolutionary movements 
in Egypt in a.d. 1879-82 and in Russia in a.d. 1825, 3 considering that 
‘Abd-al-Hamid’s delusion had not ever clouded the clearer spirits of 
a Mehmed ‘All or a Peter. So far from seeking to confine the Western 
education of their subjects to a strictly technical minimum training of 
naval and military cadets, these two Herodian-minded men of genius 
were tempted to plunge out of their depth in the abuse of their auto¬ 
cratic power by exerting it for the opposite purpose of driving their 
subjects into a Western course of education on a front that they 
were perpetually extending ; 4 and this progressive widening of their 

1 Hcllmuth von Moltkc, when attached to HSfiz Pasha’s Turkish army in a.d. 1839, 
was struck by the magnitude of the rate of sickness among the troops, notwithstanding 
the excellence of their conditions of life (Briefe uber Zuttande und Begebtnheiun in der 
Ttirkci aus den Jahren 1835 bit 1839 (Berlin, Posen, & Bromberg 184:, Mittler), p. 301). 
He estimated this army’s average peace-time losses by death from sickness at 33$ per 
cent, for oil arms (ibid., pp. 350-1) and at 50 per cent, for the infantry (ibid., p. 382). 

1 On pp. 232-8, above. 

1 Sec pp. 234-5, above. In the issue of Le Monde Slave for December 1925 (Nou- 
velle Sdrie, 2 rac Annde, No. 12, Paris 1925, Alcan), which is devoted to 'le Centenaire 
des Ddcabristcs’, it is pointed out (p. 345) that the Decembrists were the last military 
conspirators and the first political theorists in the history of Petrine Russia. In the 
eighteenth century there had been five Russian palace revolutions (in a.d. 1725, 1730, 
1740, 1741, 1761), all led by guards officers recruited from the nobility, and the revolu¬ 
tion of a.d. x8ot had been of the same character (ibid., p. 335). The Decembrists, whose 
abortive revolution in December 1825 marked the sociological transition in Russia to 
a revolutionary movement of a new type, were representatives of the fifth of the eight 
generations spanning the period between the date of Peter the Great’s death and the 
year a.d. xosc (ibid., p. 334)- Perhaps one reason why the abortive liberal revolution of 
a.d. 1825 in Russia had military officers for its leaders, notwithstanding the impulse 
given by Peter the Great, a hundred years before the Decembrists’ day, to civilian as 
well as military education on Western lines, was that, as a result of the part which Russia 
was forced, by French aggression, to play in the Napoleonic Wars, the Russian military 
officers of that generation had been brought into more direct personal touch with the 
West than the majority of their Russian contemporaries of the same Western-educated 
class in civilian life. The effect on the Decembrists’ outlook that was produced by their 
service abroad on Western ground, where the contrast between the Western World and 
a superficially Westernized Russia made its impression on their minds with all the 
sharpness of a first-hand experience, is noticed in the study here cited (Le Monde Slave. 
num. cit., pp. 336, 338, 351, and 376). The effect was particularly strong in the case 
of those Russian officers who took part in the occupation of Paris in a.d. ,8, 4 - „ 

* Mehmed Ah, like Peter, used the moral pull of his own personal example, as well 



552 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
educational programme is the more remarkable considering that it was 
dictated to them by their practical experience in the pursuit of educa¬ 
tional aims which, in intention, were strictly, and indeed narrowly, 
utilitarian from first to last. 

Both Peter and Mehmed ‘All were led towards their ambitious 
Herodian educational objective along two convergent routes. On the 
one hand they both realized that, in order to secure an intake of military 
and naval cadets equipped with a general cultivation in the Western 
style as a background for their technical training in a Western art, they 
must create a reservoir of boys endowed with a preparatory educa¬ 
tion on these non-tcchnical Western lines. On the other hand they both 
also realized that, however effective an education they might succeed in 
providing in their naval and military cadet schools and in the civilian 
preparatory schools leading up to them, these new institutions by them¬ 
selves would not avail to produce and maintain those fighting forces of a 
Western pattern and standard that were the practical object of their 
educational endeavours. Such fighting forces required auxiliary services 
which in turn required a special technically trained personnel; this 
expensively elaborate establishment could not be kept up without an 
expansion of the public revenue; the revenue could not be expanded 
without a rise in the taxable income of the community; production could 
not be increased without technical improvements in agriculture and 
industry; 1 none of these requirements could be met without providing a 
further personnel of Western-educated civil servants and economic 
experts; and the requisite intake of civilian cadets could only be secured 
by furnishing the general preparatory education alia Franca which was 
likewise a necessary condition for ensuring a supply of naval and military 
cadets of the proper quality. 

In Mehmed ‘All’s Egypt the Westernization of education ‘was in origin 
the natural corollary to the reform of the Army’. 1 The infantry’, cavalry, 
and artillery schools under Western commandants, which we have noticed 
in an earlier chapter of this Part, 3 were supplemented by engineering 

as the physical push of political coercion, as a means of moving his subjects to take the 
Westward road. The celebrated initiative shown by Peter in mastering one branch of 
contemporary Western technology after another has been noticed in an earlier passage 
of this Study (in III. ui. 279-80) and needs no further exposition here. Mehmed 'All, 
who had grown up without being educated even in the Islamic culture that was his own 
social heritage, and who never mastered any other language beyond his native Turkish, 
picked up an acquaintance with the contemporary Western Civilization by taking oppor¬ 
tunities of talking to Frankish visitors, learnt to read at the age of forty-five, and studied 
the histories of Alexander the Great and Napoleon (Clot, op. cit., vol. i, p. lxxvii). 
Moreover, this Ottoman apostle of Westernization was more fortunate than his Mus¬ 
covite counterpart in finding an enthusiastic disciple, and not a sullen opponent, in his 
eldest son and heir. Ibrihim Pasha was energetic, orderly minded, and Petrine in his 
practice of sharing the hardships of his soldiers on campaign (ibid., p. Ixxxiii). He had 
been educated to read and write Turkish, Arabic, and Persian, and he was versed in 
Islamic history (ibid., p. Ixxx). He gave a lead to his officers in schooling himself in the 
Western art of war (ibid., p. lxxxi), and also showed 2 practical interest in the improve¬ 
ment of Egyptian agriculture on Western lines (ibid., p. Ixxxiv). Another of Mehmed 
'Aii’s sons, Sa'id, learnt to speak French fluently and received a mathematical education 
as the basis for his professional training as a naval officer (ibid., p. Ixxxv). 

1 Mehmed ‘All’s policy of Westernization on the economic plane has been touched 
upon on p. 240, above. 

1 Dodwcll, H.: The Founder of Modern Egypt (Cambridge 1931, University Press), 
P* * 37 - J On pp. 243-4, «bove. 



'ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER’ 553 
and naval schools 1 and were reinforced by the establishment, in the 
citadel of Cairo, of a mathematical and drawing school under an Italian 
master 2 and a cannon foundry under a Turkish manager, Edhem Bey, 
whose intellectual and administrative gifts won high praise from the 
Duke of Ragusa (alias A. F. L. V. de Marmont, the Napoleonic French 
marshal); 3 and the technical training of personnel for Mehmcd ‘All’s 
fighting forces and their auxiliary services was underpinned by the 
introduction of a system of general education alia Franca in Egypt itself 
and was at the same time improved in quality by arrangements for 
enabling an elite of the students to pursue courses of Western study on 
Western ground. 

As early in Mehmed ‘All’s reign as a.d. 1812, a school was opened in 
Cairo by his director of the supply of materials, Muhammad Efendi 
Tubbal. 4 In a.d. 1816 the Pasha himself opened a school of engineering 
and surveying in his own palace with eighty Egyptian students and with 
Western instructors and instruments. 5 In a.d. 1833 a polytechnic was 
founded, as a preparatory school for the military cadet colleges, with two 
French, two Armenian, and six Muslim instructors; 6 primary schools 
were founded at Cairo and Alexandria to feed the polytechnic; several 
local schools were also established in each provincial miidirlik; and these 
educational establishments at divers levels were so many rungs in a ladder 
leading up to the public service. 7 The year a.d. 1836 saw the inaugura¬ 
tion of a French-inspired Council of Education ( Majlis-al-Ma'Srif) 
administering fifty elementary and secondary schools distributed over 
the country. The pupils of these schools were recruited by conscription 8 
and the secondary schools were organized on military lines \ 9 but, on the 
other side of the account, these schoolboy-conscripts enjoyed the advan¬ 
tage of drawing pay and rations from the Government. 10 

In reply to a questionnaire drafted by Bowring when he was collecting 
materials for the report which he submitted to Lord Palmerston in a.d. 
1839, Mukhtar Bey, an official in Mehmed ‘All’s sendee, made a return 
of the number of pupils receiving instruction at the time in non-military 
special schools in the Pasha’s dominions. According to this statement 
there were then 300 pupils in the medical school, 120 in the veterinary 

* Sec Dodwell, H.: The Founder of Modern Egypt (Cambridge 1931, University 
Press), p. 238. Native Egyptians were not accepted as candidates for entry into the cadet 
schools at Cairo and Alexandria (Kramers, J. H.: s.v. ‘Khediw’, in the Encyclopaedia of 
Islam, vol. ii (London 1927, Luzac), p. 952). 

* See Dodwell, op. cit., p. 238. 

> See Clot, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 206-7. The same highly qualified foreign observer 
also praised Mehmed 'All's small-arms factories, which were organized on a French 
model (ibid., vol. ii, pp. 277-8). 

* See Jabarti, Shaykh 'Abd-ar-RahmSn al-: Ajd'ib-al-Alhdr fi'l-Tardjimtea’lAkhbdr 
(French translation, Paris 1888-96, Lcroux, 9 vols.), vol. yiii, p. 373. 

s See Jabarti, op. cit., vol. ix, p. 192. Jabarti records (in op. cit., vol. ix, on p. 207) 
that, in opening his first school, Mehmed ‘Ali had been acting on the suggestion of a 
Muslim traveller, linguist, and man of science named Hasan Darwlsh al-Mawsill, who 
made the welfare of the poorer students his particular personal concern. A master was 
brought from Turkey to teach pupils whose mother tongue was not Arabic. 

6 See Dodwell, op. cit., p. 238. Three of the Muslim instructors had been educated 
in France, and three in England. 

’ See ibid. 

8 See Bowring, Report on Egypt and Candia, p. 135. 

* See ibid., p. 128. 


>® See ibid., p. 126. 



554 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
school, 225 in the polytechnic, 150 in the school of Western languages, 
150 in the school of music, 50 in the school of agriculture, 20 in the 
school of midwifery, and 300 in the school of book-keeping. The num¬ 
bers of students in the schools of agriculture and midwifery were to be 
increased—in the latter school from 20 to 100. ' This systematic network 
of special and general educational institutions on Western lines 2 was 
eventually completed in a.d. 1867. 3 The extent and the limits of this 
progressive broadening of a Westernizing educational system that had 
been introduced originally for the particular technical purpose of creat¬ 
ing a new-model army go far to explain, between them, both the sub¬ 
sequent rise of a nationalist movement in the ranks of a callow Egyptian 
intelligentsia and the failure of this movement, at its first outbreak under 
‘Arabi’s leadership, owing to its inability at this stage to enlist the sup¬ 
port of the illiterate masses of the peasantry, from whom the intelligent¬ 
sia had become culturally alienated in the act of imbibing the tincture of 
Western culture that was the intelligentsia’s distinctive hall-mark and 
raison d'itre? 

Side by side with this development of education alia Franca in 
Egypt itself, Mehmed ‘Alt and his successors maintained, from a.d. 
1826 to circa a.d. 1870, an Egyptian Scientific Mission {Al-Ba'that-al- 
'Ilmiyah ) in Paris. 3 The first batch of students to benefit by this scheme, 
who were sent to Paris in a.d. 1826, 4 were placed under the superinten¬ 
dence of Jomard, the French official commissioner for the publication 
of the discoveries of the Napoleonic Institut d’figypte. There were 
forty-four of thcm, s all native Egyptians; 6 and they were followed in the 
years a.d. 1827-33 by other batches, amounting to about sixty students 
in all, 7 consisting likewise mostly of fallahln. 8 One hundred and fourteen 
students, in all, had been sent from Egy pt to Paris by a.d. 1840, the date 
of publication of Clot Bey’s book. 9 

The same educational policies were pursued with greater violence in 
Petrine Russia. 10 Like Mehmed ‘All, Peter found it impossible to start 

' Sec Bowring, Report on Egypt and Candia, p. 194. 

1 The particular Western lines followed in Egypt were the French (Bowring, op. cit., 
p. 125). 

* Sec Kramers, ibid., p. 952. 

* These were not actually the first Egyptian Muslim students to go to the West. 
They had predecessors who had already studied in Italy and France; and one of these, 
'Uthmin Efendi NQr-ad-Dfn, who had been appointed head of a college at Qasr-al-*Ayn, 
founded a staif school at Khtinqih in a.d. 1826 (Clot, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 312). 

5 See Clot, op. cit,, vol. ii, p. 313. Dodwell, op. cit., p. 203, gives the number as 
forty-five on the authority of a dispatch of the 4th April, 1826. from Salt, the British 
Consul-General in Egypt at the time (F.O. 78/147); but Cloths figure is more worthy of 
credence, since he gives the details. Eleven of the students in this batch were trained 
in administration and diplomacy, 8 in navigation, military engineering, and gunnery; 2 
in medicine ar.d surgery; 5 in agriculture, mining, and natural history; 4 in chemistry; 
4 in hydraulics and metallurgy; 3 in engraving and lithography; 1 in translation; and 1 
in architecture, while 5 went back to Egypt without having qualified in any discipline. 

6 See Dodwell, op. cit., p. 203. 

7 The batch sent to Paris in a.d. 1833 was twelve strong (Bowring, op. cit., p. 140). 

* See Clot., op. cit., vol. ii, p. 313. Out of these later batches of Egyptian students 
sent to Pans, forty students were allocated to mechanical arts and twelve to pharmacy 
and medicine. 

» See Clot, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 313. Besides the students at Paris, there were at this time 
also Egyptian apprentices in France at Elboeuf and at Rheims (Bowring, op. cit., p. 42). 

•0 Education by force was the key-note of Petrine educational policy (see Mettig, C.: 
Die Eu’opehnerung Ruislands im 18. Jahrliundtrle (Gotha 1913, Perthes), p. 80). 



'ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER’ 555 
the process of Westernization without importing Western experts; 1 but 
Peter’s ambition likewise 2 was to replace these aliens as soon as possible 
by Western-trained subjects of his own; and in Russia, as in Egypt, the 
education of native officers for Westernized fighting services was re¬ 
inforced by a training of native technicians for Westernized auxiliary 
sendees. A school of navigation, for example, was opened at Moscow in 
a.d. 1701, under the direction of a Scottish mathematician from Aber¬ 
deen named Farquharson, whose Russian pupils were recruited from 
children of all classes; 3 and a technical education was forced upon all 
male members of the Russian nobility by an edict of a.d. 1714 for¬ 
bidding them to marry till they had passed an examination in geo¬ 
metry, arithmetic, and navigation. 4 In a.d. 1736 compulsory education, 
between the ages of seven and twenty, was imposed on all noblemen’s 
sons, and these aristocratic educational conscripts were subjected to 
a series of three examinations, with compulsory service in the ranks of 
the Army as the penalty for failing to pass.* A corps of pages was 
founded in a.d. 1730 6 and a cadet corps in a.d. 1731, 7 and garrison 
schools were started in a.d. 1732. 7 Schools for non-Christian subjects 
of the Russian Empire were founded at Astrakhan in a.d. 1732 and at 
Qazan in a.d. 1735. 8 The University of Moscow was opened in a.d. 
1755 ; 8 and a commission for the promotion of elementary education was 
appointed in a.d. 1778, with a Hungarian Serb savant , Yankovid, as its 
moving spirit. 9 

This progressive widening of the range of a new-fangled Western 
system of education at home was accompanied in Peter’s Russia, as in 
Mchmcd ‘All’s Egypt, by an effort to improve this exotic education’s 
quality through sending an Hite of the students to school in the West. 10 

« During ‘the Great Embassy* of a.d. 1697-98, ‘at least 750 men were recruited for 
service in Russia. Most of them were Dutchmen, but there were also a good number of 
Italians, Slavs, and Greeks from the Adriatic lands, skilled in the building and handling 
of galleys’ (Sumner, B. H.: Peter the Great and the Emergence of Russia (London 1950, 
English Universities Press), p. 35; cp. p. 89). A smsll team of English master- 
shipwrights were given specially favourable treatment (ibid., p. 00). A Norwegian sea- 
cuptain named Cruys, who was persuaded in A.D. 1698 to transfer from the Dutch to 
the Russian service, rose to be an admiral in the Russian Baltic fleet (ibid., p. 36). The 
employment of Westerners (other than those who became Russian subjects as a result 
of the conquest of the Baltic provinces in a.d. «7«o) was, however, mostly confined to 
the technical field. Not only the higher posts in the fighting sendees, but also those in 
business and industry, were normally resented for Russian subjects, and ‘no instance is 
known of any establishment started in Peter’s reign from imported capital’ (ibid., pp. 
167-8). 

J For Mchmcd 'Ali’s policy on this point, sec p. 603, n. 1, below. 

* See Mcttig, op. cit., p. 78; Sumner, op. cit., pp. 35 and 152. 

* See Sumner, B. H.: Peter the Great and the Emergence of Russia (London 1950, 
English Universities Press), p. 153; Mettig, op. cit., p. 412,followed in III. iii. 282, n. 2. 

» See Mettig, op. cit., p. 412. 

<> a.d. 1730 was the date according to Sumner, B. H.: Peter the Great and the Emer¬ 
gence of Russia (London 1950, English Universities Press), p. 153; a.d. 1759 according 
to Mettig, op. cit., p. 83. 

' See Mettig, op. cit., p. 82. 8 See ibid., p. 84. 

« See ibid., pp. 96-97. 

In Muscovy, as in the Ottoman Empire, this was a revolutionary departure from 
traditional practice. In general the only missions on which Muscovite subjects had been 
allowed to go abroad before Peter’s reign had been embassies, pilgrimages, and theo¬ 
logical studies in Eastern Orthodox Christian foreign countries. When Peter’s early 
seventeenth-century predecessor Boris Godunov ( imperabat a.d. 1598-1605) had tried 
to break with this tradition by sending five students to LObeck, six to France, and four to 
England, only one of these fifteen doves had returned to the Muscovite ark. Of the four 



556 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
Fifty young Russian noblemen were sent to the West for technical 
instruction a few months ahead of Peter’s own departure on his grand 
tour as a technological apprentice in a.d. 1697; 1 and more than a hun¬ 
dred Russian students were expatriated in that year. 1 Students of the 
languages of the Islamic World were sent to Persia in a.d. 1716; and the 
first Russian naval students to go to Western countries were a batch 
sent abroad in a.d. 1719. 3 These early Petrine Russian students abroad 
were unwilling pupils ; 4 but their recalcitrance was countered by exact¬ 
ing instructions and by the prospect of seeing their estates confiscated 
by the Tsar if they did not bring home satisfactory evidence that they 
had performed the tasks laid upon them. 5 Peter maintained a strict 
control over these student-conscripts during their period of foreign 
service, 6 and in Holland he appointed a resident inspector to look after 
them. 7 On the other hand he rewarded Russian technological students 
who had made a success of their tour of study abroad by providing them, 
on their return to Russia, with capital to enable them to set up for them¬ 
selves in business. 8 These eighteenth-century Russian students in 
Western countries, like their nineteenth-century Egyptian counterparts, 
came under the general influence of the contemporary Western culture 
in the process of acquiring their Western technological training. 9 The 
learning of Western languages, for example, initiated them into a new 
world of Western manners, morals, and letters; 10 and Peter himself 
took a broad enough view of his utilitarian purpose to include the 
Western arts of painting and architecture among the subjects that his 
Russian students were sent to study abroad at first hand. 11 

In the educational, as in the technological, field, Peter's utilitarian 
bent' 2 never relaxed. 

‘To the end of his life Peter looked on education as a training for some 
specific form of state service: if men went abroad to learn economics, it 
was for the sake of his new tariff; if they were trained in languages, it was 

sent to England, one became a clergyman of the English Episcopalian Protestant Church, 
another became an official of the English Government in Ireland, and a third became 
an East India merchant. In the reign of Peter’s precursor the first Romanov Tsar, 
Michael ( imperabat a.d. 1613-45), there had been a strong reaction in Muscovy towards 
the traditional anti-Western attitude. When Prince Khvorostinin had expressed a pre¬ 
ference for Western culture, he had been compelled to recant; the Polish-educated son 
of Prince Ordin-Nashchokin had fled to the West from the intolerably anti-Western 
atmosphere of the Holy Russia of his day, and an official ban had been placed on foreign 
travel, in the manner of contemporary Japan (see Brackner, A.: Peter der Grout (Berlin 
iS 79 , Grotc), pp. 169-72). 

! See Bnlckner, A.: Peter der Groue (Berlin 1879, Grotc), p. 174. 

1 See ibid., p. x 75; Sumner, B. H.: Peter the Great and the Emergence 0} Russia (Lon¬ 
don 1950. English Universities Press), pp. 34-41. 

3 See BrOckncr, op. cit., p. 183. 

* See Bruckner, op. cit., p. 176. Bnlckner cites a diary (preserved in manuscript at 
QSzan) which had been kept by one of them—a member of the Tolstoy family, who was 
fifty-two years old at the time of his compulsory expatriation as a student of Western 
technology (ibid., p. 177). The spectacle of the Western World seen at first hand struck 
Tolstoy with amazement (ibid., p. 192). 

* See Bnlckner, op. cit., p. 175, followed in III. iii. 282, n. 2. 

6 Sec Bnlckner, op. cit., p. 182. 

* Sec ibid., p. 184. 

9 bee ibid., p. 174. 

10 See ibid., p. 189. 

" Sec Mettig, op. cit., p. 125. 

11 See pp. 674-5, below. 


7 See ibid., p. 181. 


‘ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER’ 557 

in order to act as translators or to serve as diplomatists. . . . Just as in 
Russia the foreigners played mainly a rather narrow technical, training 
r 61 e, x so .. . the Russians whom Peter sent to the West were assigned al¬ 
most exclusively to technical training.’ 1 

This invincible narrowness of Peter’s own educational outlook would 
have prevented the achievement even of Peter’s utilitarian educational 
purposes if the operation of our ‘law’ that 'one thing leads to another’ 
had not run away with Peter’s educational policy after his death. 

‘In his own lifetime . . . going to school in the West. . . neither led to 
the results he desired nor had much immediate effect upon Russian cul¬ 
ture. His own intensely practical bent and his coarse heavy-handedness 
caused him to treat his subjects far too much like inanimate objects upon 
which could be rapidly imposed a new impress or novel tasks . . . [Yet] 
this . . . aspect of his Westernisation . . . was perhaps in its ultimate in¬ 
fluence the most far-reaching of his innovations . . . [for,] within the next 
two generations . . . , very different results began to flow from Peter’s 
peremptory insistence on training abroad. Among many of the upper 
class a taste for foreign travel rapidly developed, once it was no longer 
obligatory and no longer to be spent in antipathetic apprenticeship to 
navigation or gunnery. From such travel, and from Peter’s opening of the 
door to foreign books and foreign ideas, modem Russian literature and 
culture were born.’ 1 

The vigour with which an exotic Western culture was introduced 
through these primarily utilitarian educational channels by Peter the 
Great into Muscovy and by Mehmed ‘All into Egypt makes the parallel 
measures in Mahmud IPs Turkey seem feeble and desultory by com¬ 
parison; yet here too wc can observe the same progressive expansion 
of a new-fangled educational system alia Franca from a narrowly 
naval and military nucleus. 4 Mahmud II’s unsuccessful forerunner 
Selim III (imperabat A.D. 1789-1807) had given a new impetus to a 
military engineering school founded by ‘Abd-al-Hamld I (imperabat 
a.d. 1773-89) by reorganizing it under French and British manage¬ 
ment. 5 Selim had also opened a school of navigation ; 6 and one of the 
professors at Mahmud IPs military engineering school, who was the son 
of a khoja of Jewish origin, became a pioneer translator of Western 
technological works into Turkish. 7 Though an Imperial Military School 

« See p. 551, n. 1, above.—A.J.T. 

1 Sumner, op. cit., pp. 152 and 205. * Ibid., p. 205. 

4 Sec Davison, R. H.: Reform in the Ottoman Empire, iSs6-iSy6 (thesis submitted 
to Harvard University for the degree of Ph.D., rst April, 1942), p. 98. died here, by 
permission of the author, while in process of revision for possible publication. 

s Sec Kramers, J. H., s.v. 'Selim III’, in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, vol. iv (London 
1934, Luzac). p. 220. 'The Westcrnioing movement did not spring fully armed from the 
head of Selim III. Mahmud I (imperabat a.d. i 73 °- 54 ) employed the Comte de 
Bonncval to reorganise the Corps of Bombardiers on Western lines. Under Mustafa III 
(imperabat a.d. 1757-73) Baron de Tott did the same for the Artillery and taught at 
the newly established School of Naval Engineering. Nor should Halil Hamid Pasha in 
the next reign be forgotten: he opened a School of Military Engineering and strove 
vigorously to modernise the Army until 'Abd-al-Hamid I (imperabat a.d, 1773-89) 
began to suspect him of preparing a coup d'etat' —G. L. Lewis in The Listener, 4th 
December 1952, p. 034. 

6 Sec Kramers, ibid. 

i See Davison, op. cit., p. 99 - 



558 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 

was founded in Turkey in a.d. 1830,’ it was said 2 that the only manual of 
instruction possessed by Mahmud II’s new-model Turkish army as late 
as circa a.d. 1835 was an elementary handbook with the title L'ficole du 
Soldat which had been bought by Khosrev Pasha from a French corporal 
named Gaillard; but a polytechnic for officers under the management of 
three French instructors was opened circa a.d. 1846; 3 and this step was 
followed up by the opening of an agricultural school in a.d. 1848 4 and 
a veterinary school in a.d. 1850. 4 The opening, in the same year 1850, of 
a school for training civil servants in the mosque of the Validch Sult 3 n 
in Istanbul followed up Mahmud II’s foundation of schools for the 
same purpose in the mosques of Sultan Ahmed and Sultan SuleymSn. 4 
A scheme for secular primary education in Turkey was approved on 
paper in a.d. 1846, but the first effective steps in this direction were not 
taken till some twenty years later, 5 and then only at French instigation. 

In the history of the Westernization of the Ottoman and Russian 
worlds the waves of Western cultural influence that were sent coursing 
through the veins of the Westernizing society’s body social by an 
Herodian-minded autocrat’s initial measures for the limited purpose of 
providing himself with an officers’ corps trained in the contemporary 
Western art of war were reinforced by waves of comparable potency 
arising from parallel measures, likewise inspired by the example of 
contemporary Western practice, for looking after the health of the 
troops and crews of standing armies and navies modelled on a Western 
pattern. 

In Russia the organization of public hygiene, which Peter had first 
approached from a naval and military standpoint, 6 had progressed far 
beyond its narrow original limits by the end of Peter’s reign. An Imperial 
Medical Chancery was established in Russia in a.d. 1725 ; 7 precautionary 
measures were taken against the plague; 7 and, when this scourge 
attacked Moscow in a.d. 1773, the public health service demonstrated 
its efficiency. 8 In a.d. 1764 the Empress Catherine II set a personal 
example in the field of preventive medicine by submitting to vaccina¬ 
tion. 9 

In Egypt, Mehmed ‘All’s approach to the exotic Western institution 
of public hygiene was the same as Peter’s in Russia. His motives in 
introducing Western medicine into his dominions were a concern for 
the health of his new-model army 10 and a terror of the plague." He was 

« See Engelhardt, E.: La Turquie el le Tanzimat (Paris 1882-4, Cotillon & Pichon 
[successeur], 2 vols.), vol. ii, p. 8, n. x. 

1 See Rosen, G.: Gesehichte der TGrhei von dem Siege der Reform im Jahrt 1826 bit 
sum Pariier Traetal vomjahre 1856 (Leipzig 1856, HirzeJ, 2 vols.), vol. i, p. 232. 

> See Engelhardt, op. tit., vol. i, p. 82. 

* See Engelhardt, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 8, n. x. 

5 See Engelhardt, op. tit., vol. ii, p. 296. 

6 Sec Mcttig, op. tit., p. 266. The first hospital in Russia was a military one founded 
by Peter the Great (sec Sumner, op. tit., p. 206). 

7 See Mettig. op. cit., p. 266. * See op. cit., p. 92. 

0 See op. cit., p. 94. The officiant on this occasion was an English doctor. Russian doc¬ 
tors did not rise to taking equal rank with foreigners till after the beginning of the nine¬ 
teenth century (ibid., p. 9t), and Russians were originally debarred altogether from 
practising as apothecaries (p. 90). 

10 See Clot, op. tit., vol. ii, p. 369. 

11 As early in his reign as a.d. 18x2—thirteen years before the arrival of the French 



•ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER’ 559 

fortunate in being served by a French medical officer, Dr. A. B. Clot, 
who was not only competent but was also imaginative, public spirited, 
and courageous. In the course of his fifteen years’ service in Egypt, Clot 
succeeded in propagating his new-fangled and unwelcome organization 
of public hygiene alia Franca from its first narrow lodgement in Suley¬ 
man Pasha’s cantonments into the remotest corners of native Egyptian 
civil life. 

With five years' study of medicine in his native France behind him, 1 
Clot arrived in Egypt in a.d. 1825 2 to organize a medical service for the 
Egyptian Army, and managed to secure the adoption of the French 
Army’s health regulations and the establishment of a conseil de santi on 
the same French military pattern. 2 He showed his imagination in 
arranging that the officers of his medical corps should wear exactly the 
same uniforms as the combatant officers of corresponding rank, 1 and 
his courage in insisting that Christian members of the corps should be 
given the same status as their Muslim colleagues; 4 but the great achieve¬ 
ment in his career was his victory in a struggle to break out of the narrow 
confines of the barrack square into the vast virgin field of native Egyptian 
civil life. 

Against a violent opposition—inspired by a general spirit of Islamic 
conservatism and a particular Islamic prejudice against the practical 
study of anatomy by the experimental method of dissection—Clot 
succeeded in persuading Mehmed ‘Ali to found a medical school. 5 The 
school was opened in a.d. 1827 6 with a hundred Egyptian pupils, who 
were maintained and paid by the Government, and with seven Western 
professors of divers nationalities. 7 A midwives’ school, a maternity 
hospital, a pharmaceutical school, a preparatory school, and a school for 
learning French 8 were attached to the medical school itself, 5 and the 
two last-mentioned subsidiary institutions for providing Egyptian medical 
students with a general education on Western lines were manifestly 
indispensable adjuncts to the undertaking, since, to begin with, the 
teaching had to be given through interpreters. 10 Twelve of the original 
batch of pupils were sent on to Paris, where they were examined (in 
French) by the Academy of Medicine and were given the degree of 
doctor of medicine by the medical faculty of the university." The popular 

physician Clot in Egypt to organize a public health service for him—Mehmed ‘All set 
up a quarantine control at the port of Alexandria, on the advice of resident Western 
physicians in private practice there, after receipt of the news that the plague had broken 
out in Constantinople (Jabartl, op. cit., vol. viii, p. 341). Early in a.d. 1813 the Pasha, 
without lifting his outlandish Quarantine, reinforced it by the more familiar traditional 
Islamic preventive measure of giving orders for the liturgical reading aloud of Al- 
Bukhari’s theological works in the Mosque of Al-Azhar; but after three days the 'ulami 
broke off the recitation out of laziness (ibid., vol. ix, p. 9 )- The Grand Qadi of Egypt 
declared his official approval of the quarantine (ibid., p. 19), but the troops paid no 
attention to it (ibid., p. 22). 

« Sec Clot, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 373. 1 Sec ibid., p. 370. 

1 See ibid., p. 375. * See ibid., p. 376. 

» See ibid., pp. 383-4. 6 Sec ibid., p. 384. 

7 French, Italian, Spanish, German (ibid., p. 391). These Frankish professors were 
required, as part of their duties, to attend at the hospitals (Bowring, op. cit., pp. I 34 ~S)- 

* The French professors in this school taught mathematics, history, ar.d geography, 
as well as their mother tongue (Bowring, op. cit., p. 134). 

9 See Clot, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 385-7. 

Sec ibid., p. 384. 


«» See ibid., p. 388. 



560 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
prejudice against dissection was successfully overcome; 1 but the military 
discipline, to which Clot's medical students were subject, had to be 
rigorously enforced; 2 and, like his colleague and compatriot the French 
soldier Sfcve (alias Suleyman Pasha), this intrepid French medical 
officer risked his life in doing his duty. 1 

Clot had his reward when his medical school was transferred from its 
original site at Abu Za'bal to the Qasr-al-'Ayn Palace in Cairo, 4 and 
when he was allowed to turn the former military hospital on the 
EzbekTyeh Square in Cairo into a civilian hospital in the Western style 5 
and to transfer to it the patients languishing in an old-fashioned 
marastan that had been founded by the Mamluk Sultan QalS’un 
(dominabatur a.d. 1279-90). 6 By the year a.d. 1840 (the date of publica¬ 
tion of Clot’s book) the EzbekTyeh civilian hospital had seven hundred 
beds (divided in equal numbers between the men's and the women's 
wards), with additional provision for maternity cases and for lunatics, 
while there were now eighteen hundred beds in the Cairo military 
hospital, which had been transferred to Qasr-al-'Ayn. 7 Side by side 
with these medical establishments in and around Cairo, Alexandria had 
been equipped by the same date with an intendance de santi, a naval 
hospital containing 1,200-1,500 beds, and a military hospital containing 
500-600 beds. 8 Clot’s original maternity hospital, which remained at 
Abu Za'bal, had a French directress, recruited from the maternity 
hospital of Paris, and a staff of Sudanese and Abyssinian midwives. 0 
Madame Gault taught her apprentices the French language as well as 
the Western midwife’s art, and the negro women, as well as the Amharas, 
proved to be intelligent. 10 A new maternity hospital, with a school of 
midwifery attached to it, was afterwards opened in Cairo.” 

One of the most valuable fruits of Clot Bey’s labours was the transla¬ 
tion into Arabic, and publication in Egypt, of Western medical works ; ,z 
and this indefatigable propagator of Western culture in Dar-al-Isl 5 m 
through a medical channel had full justification for claiming that 

‘L’£cole de m^decine a iti d£jk ct sera toujours un foyer dc lumiires 
rayonnant sur toute la population.’ 15 

A traditional Islamic fanaticism and superstition had been successfully 
eradicated from the souls of Clot Bey’s medical students; 14 and by a.d. 

* See Clot, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 38s. 1 See ibid., pp. 38s and 380. 

i One of Clot Bey’s pupils attempted to assassinate him (ibid., pp. 388-9). The 
attempt made on Sive’a life by the recruits whom he was training has been recorded on 
p. 242, n. 2, above. * See ibid., p. 392. 

» See ibid., p. 396. * See ibid., p. 393, n. 2. 

7 See Clot., op. cit., vol. i, p. 282. * See ibid., p. 269. 

9 See Clot, op. cit.. vol. ii, p. 393. A pagan Sudanese or a Monophysite Christian 
Abyssinian would be free from the prejudice that inhibited a Muslim Egyptian woman 
of that generation from qualifying for a profession which was likewise still without 
honour in contemporary Western eyes that had less excuse for looking down upon it, 
considering that by this time they were already aware of its practical utility. 

1° See ibid., pp. 393 and 394, n. 2. 51 See ibid., p. 394, n. 2. 

11 See ibid., p. 397. is Ibid., pp. 397-8. 

. 14 This claim of Clot’s that Western medicine was breaking down religious barriers 
in Egypt was endorsed by Bowring in op. tit., p. 141. The introduction, into a traditional 
Islamic social milieu, of Western medicine for the benefit of human being3 probably 
had to contend with a more stubborn opposition than the contemporaneous intro¬ 
duction of the Western veterinary art, since, in a department of medicine in which the 



‘ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER’ 56: 
1840 it was already possible for this benevolent Western Lucifer to 
observe that 


‘Ces progr&s intellectuels port^s dans les families y fructifient peu a peu, 
et de Ik sc rdpandent parmi leurs compatriotes.’* 

Clot Bey’s claim that the Western art of medicine had proved in 
Egypt to be a particularly potent vehicle for the radiation of the Western 
culture is borne out by a piquant illustration preserved in the dossier of 
an official British observer who was visiting Egypt about the time when 
Clot was sending his book to the press. In his report submitted to Lord 
Palmerston on the 27th March, 1839, Sir John Bowring mentions that 

‘There is a hospital at Alexandria, for the special use of the Navy— 
though sometimes a few persons are admitted, on an order of the governor, 
who are not employed in the public service, and a department of the hos¬ 
pital has lately been applied to the reception of pregnant women, whose 
acceptance of the aid of Frank medical men is one of the most remarkable 
evidences of the growth of a more tolerant and enlightened spirit.’ 2 

The presence of a lying-in ward within the precincts of a naval 
hospital seems as incongruous to Western minds imprisoned in their 
own preconceived order of ideas as the initiation of a liberal political 
revolution by subaltern military officers; yet in this case, as in that, a 
combination of circumstances that would have been bizarre on native 
Western ground turns out to have been natural and normal in a non- 
Western social milieu that was in process of being penetrated by Western 
cultural influences. The master-link in a chain of social cause and effect 
leading inevitably to a result that is surprising only at first sight is duly 
pointed out in a report on the medical schools in Mehmed ‘All's Egypt, 
from the pen of Clot Bey himself, which is incorporated in Bowring’s 
general report to Palmerston. 

‘In commencing the great work of reformations that he determined 
upon, Mahomet Ali made offers to European officers of every rank and 
department; a general military organisation was introduced; and then, as 
a matter of course, a medical service was created for the preservation of the 
Egyptian forces.’ 2 

The key here provided by Clot makes it easy for us to solve the riddle 
that is presented at first sight by the presence of a lying-in ward in a naval 


beneficiaries were animals, the Islamic prejudice against the dissection of human bodies 
did not arise, while on the other hand Muslim minds were predisposed in its favour 
by a humane Islamic tradition (which put contemporary Western practice to shame) of 
showing mercy to non-human living creatures. Veterinary surgeons were introduced 

S Mehmed 'Ali into Egypt from the West in a.d. 1827, and a veterinary school, origin- 
y located at Rosetta, was afterwards transferred to Abu Za'bal, where it was placed 


quality of the Pasha’s stud. The course of study 
years; and here, as in the medical school, one of the fruits of Westernization was the 
translation into Arabic, and publication in Egypt, of the principal Western scientific 
works on the subject (Clot, op. cit., voL ii, pp. 407-14). 

1 Ibid., pp. 397-8. 

1 Bowring, Report on Egypt and Candia (London 1S40, Clowes & Clowes), pp. 
55-56. Cp. p. 141, n. •. 

J Clot Bey in Bowring, op. cit., p. 139. This passage from Clot’s pen is reproduced 
in paraphrase by Bowring in his own report on p. 138. 



562 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
hospital at Alexandria in a.d. 1839. In an earlier chapter of this Part, 1 we 
have already noticed that Mchmed ‘Ali had been quick to learn, from 
his experience in the Napoleonic Wars, the lesson that, in the contem¬ 
porary play of Western power politics, sea power was a supremely 
potent instrument of policy. Upon his acquisition of the Pashalyq of 
Egypt, he had promptly translated observation into action by equipping 
himself with a navy of the contemporary Western pattern; and, after 
losing the best part of his newly acquired fleet at Navarino in a.d. 1827, 
he had turned a disaster to good account by setting himself to re-create 
his navy on a sounder basis than before. At this second essay, he had no 
longer been content just to buy up ready-made Western warships and 
to hire ready-trained Western naval officers. He had decided to establish 
at Alexandria a naval arsenal in which warships designed on Western 
lines by Egyptian naval architects and built by Egyptian artificers were 
to be commanded and navigated by Egyptian naval officers and manned 
by Egyptian crews. This was Mchmed ‘All’s ultimate objective when 
he founded his arsenal at Alexandria in a.d. 1829; but so ambitious a goal 
as this was manifestly impossible to attain at one bound. The new 
Egyptian naval arsenal could not become a going concern without 
receiving at least a first impetus from the hands of imported Western 
naval officers, naval architects, and shipwrights. Accordingly, negotia¬ 
tions were opened for enlisting the services of a fresh batch of Western 
naval experts. But these Western technicians who were still indispensable 
agents for the execution of Mchmed ‘All’s purpose in this field were 
unwilling to accept the Pasha’s invitation to take up employment in 
Egypt, even on attractive financial terms, unless they could bring their 
families with them; and they were unwilling to expose their wives and 
children to the plagues of Egypt without being assured of having 
Western physicians on the spot to look after their health. 

No doctors, no arsenal! The instalment of a Western medical staff was 
a condition sine qiia non if the Pasha was to be successful in enticing the 
indispensable Western naval experts to accept his offers. A proper 
complement of Western physicians therefore accompanied the imported 
Western technicians and their families, gave adequate attention to their 
Frankish clientele’s health, and found themselves with energy still to 
spare and time still on their hands. Like the Franks that they were, 
these under-employed physicians were not content, as a contemporary 
‘Osmanli might have been, to accept this golden opportunity of indulg¬ 
ing in keyf alia Turca. The restlessness which was the curse or blessing 
of the Frankish ethos impelled them to keep themselves busy on some¬ 
thing ; and the obvious next ‘other business’ on their agenda, when they 
had done all that they could for a handful of Frankish residents, w'as to 
try to meet the most urgent medical needs of the native population. In 
any mammalian society the most constant demand for medical aid is 
that presented by maternity cases; and thus the idea of opening a lying- 
in ward in their naval hospital, so far from being far-fetched, was the all 
but inevitable first step in the quite inevitable enlargement of the range 
of these imported Frankish physicians’ practice. 

1 On p. 244, n. 1, above. 



'ONE THING LEADS TO ANOTHER* 563 
How one thing led to another in the thoughts and actions of these 
Western medical practitioners in partibus Agarenorum has now been 
explained; but it is none the less amazing that, through the unforeseen 
and unsolicited agency of Franks imported into Egypt to tend their own 
kind, a Macedonian Turkish Pasha’s determination to provide himself 
with a navy on the Western model should have revolutionized the social 
life of the native population of the country by breaking down one of the 
strongest of all traditional Islamic tabus. Within the living memory of 
the Muslims and the Franks of Mehmcd ‘All’s and Clot’s generation, 
the best-beloved of the wives of a theoretically autocratic Ottoman 
Padishah had been debarred by an inexorable Islamic sense of propriety 
from receiving, even if she were sick unto death, any more intimate 
ministrations from an infidel Western physician than the reading of the 
pulse on the wrist of a timidly exposed hand, 1 while the rest of the 
patient’s sorely ailing body was condemned to remain decently invisible 
and unsuccourcd behind the bed-curtains. The selfsame Frankish 
doctor, practising in Dar-al-Islam, might have had, within the normal 
span of a professional career, both of the two bewilderingly irreconcilable 
experiences of being thus constrained to fumble in the dark and of being 
invited to assist an accouchement with the sovereign scientific disregard 
for a traditional prudery that he would have been expected to show in 
ministering to one of his own Frankish countrywomen. And this revolu¬ 
tion in Egyptian Muslim behaviour in one of the most intimate of all 
medical affairs had taken place within the brief Time-span of, at the 
longest, slightly less than forty-one years, reckoning back from the date 
of Bowring’s submission of his report to the date of Napoleon’s landing 
in Egypt, 2 or a mere fifteen years if wc take Dr. Clot’s instead of General 
Buonaparte’s arrival in Egypt as our terminus post quem. 

1 See Penzer, N. M.: The Har/m (London 1936, Harrap), p. 133. 

* The traditional Islamic habit of keening middle-class and upper-class urban 
women in seclusion had been battered by French blows from outside before a spon¬ 
taneous impulse to take advantage of proffered Frankish medical facilities made it begin 
to crumble from within. A lively fear of the plague, and a proportionately strong deter¬ 
mination to take preventive measures of public hygiene, had moved the French Army 
which had occupied Egypt in a.d. 1798 to violate the sanctity of a haram which had 
previously been the Muslim householder’s castle (see Jabarti, Shaykh 'Abd-ar-Rahmfln 
al-: ‘Ajd ib-al-Athdr fi’l-Tardjim toa'l Akhbdr (French translation: Paris 1888-96, 
Leroux, 9 vols.), vol. vi, p. 276). The houses of Muslim families in Cairo were forcibly 
entered and disinfected by the French in systematic domiciliary visits (ibid., p. 155), 
and the Chief Medical Officer of the French forces distributed a tract on smallpox to the 
members of the diwfln (ibid., p. 268). This body was an advisory council of native Egyp¬ 
tian notables, originally nominated by Napoleon himself, which had been instituted to 
serve as a link between the French occupying authorities and the Egyptian people. The 
diwan had at first been composed of mayors, merchants, and 'ulamfi in equal numbers 
(see Correspondance, Bulletins, et Ordret du Jour de NafxUon, vol. iv: Exp/dition d'Egypte 
(Paris, no date, M^ricaut), p. 198). It was afterwards reorganized to consist of 'ulamS 
exclusively (Jabarti, op. cit., vol. vi, p. 259). 

The insurrection in Cairo against an alien military regime provoked the French into 
going farther. When, in the course of suppressing this revolt, they took the suburb of 
BQlaq by storm, the French soldiers seized Egyptian Muslim women and taught them to 
adopt the Western dress and manners of the day. The sequel confirmed the truth of a 
dictum of the Attic poet Menander that is quoted by Saint Paul in his First Epistle to 
the Corinthians, chap, xv, verse 33: 'Evil communications corrupt good manners.’ 
Egyptian Muslim women who had not been abducted by force majeure began to be 
corrupted by the gallantry of the French soldiers and by the manners of the French 
women who had accompanied the French expeditionary force (Jabarti, op. cit., vol. vi, 
p. 305). Many Muslim women were voluntarily given by their fathers or other legal 



564 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 

This illustration shows that, when once an assaulted society’s outer 
defences have been penetrated by an aggressively radioactive alien 
culture’s raj's, our law that ‘one thing leads to another’ may operate at 
almost break-neck speed. 

(£) RESPONSES OF THE SOUL 
x. Dehumanization 

In turning our attention from the social to the psychological conse¬ 
quences of encounters between contemporaries, we shall still find it 
convenient to give separate consideration to the respective effects on the 
parties playing the antithetical roles of ‘agent’ and ‘reagent’; and here 
again it will be best to examine the effect on the ‘agent’ first, since the 
terms of the psychological relation between our two dramatis personae 
are set by the party that has been the first to seize the initiative and that 
has thereby gained an initial ascendancy over his fellow performer. 

The representatives of an aggressively radioactive civilization that has 
been successful in penetrating an alien body social are prone to succumb 
to the hybris of the Pharisee who thanks God that he is not as other 
men are. 1 Indeed, a dominant minority is apt to look down on the recruits 
conscripted into its internal proletariat from a subjugated alien body 
social as infra-human ‘under-dogs’. The nemesis attending this particular 
vein of hybris is peculiarly ironical. In treating as an ‘under-dog’ the 
fellow human creature who happens to be momentarily at his mercy, the 
implicitly self-designated ‘top-dog’ is unconsciously reaffirming a truth 
to which he is intending to give the lie. The truth is that all souls are 
equal in the sight of their Creator; and the only result achieved by a 
human being who seeks to rob his fellows of their humanity is to divest 
himself of his own. A human being’s title to say homo sum is contingent, 
as Chremes knew, upon his also saying and feeling ‘humani nihil a me 
alienum puto’; 1 and ‘inhumanity’ is a double-edged word for describing 
behaviour that has a twofold effect. It is impossible for a human being 
to commit the sin of denying the humanity of other human souls without 
incurring, in the act, the penalty of dehumanizing himself. This is the 
besetting sin of the party that happens to be in the ascendant in an 
encounter between contemporaries in which the assaulted body social 
has been successfully penetrated by the aggressor society’s attack. All 
manifestations of inhumanity are not, however, equally heinous. In this 
descensus ad inferos there are different degrees. 

The least inhuman form of inhumanity is apt to be displayed by 

C rdians to French soldiers in lawful wedlock, in return for a nominal conversion to 
mon the French bridegroom’s part; and these Muslim wives of Frankish husbands 
leamt their husbands’ alien ways (ibid.). On the other hand, an 'ilim’s daughter suf¬ 
fered the death penalty, with her father's consent, at the hands of the French authorities 
for having misconducted herself with French soldiers (Jabarti, op. cit., vol. vii, p. 44); 
and other Muslim women likewise paid with their lives for having committed the same 
offence (ibid., p. 45).. Other Muslim women, again, who had managed to commit this 
misdemeanour with impunity, were afterwards married off by their families to un¬ 
suspecting soldiers of the Turkish army which took over the occupation of Egypt after 
the French army s capitulation (ibid., p. si). 

1 Luke xviii. 1 x. 

2 Terence: Hautontimorumtnot, L 77 (Act I, scene i, 1. 25). 



DEHUMANIZATION 565 

representatives of a successfully aggressive civilization in whose culture- 
pattern Religion is, and is felt and recognized to be, the governing and 
orienting element. In a society which has not secularized its life by 
breaking its way out of a religious chrysalis, the denial of ‘under-dog’s’ 
humanity will take the form of an assertion of his religious nullity. 
A dominant Christendom will stigmatize him as an unbaptized heathen; 
a dominant Islamic Society, as an uncircumciscd unbeliever. In thus 
trusting in themselves that they are righteous, and despising others, 1 
on account of a difference in ecclesiastical allegiance, these Christians 
and Muslims are manifestly guilty of hybris; yet, in recognizing that 
‘under-dog’, too, has a religion of a kind, albeit one that is erroneous and 
perverse, ‘top-dog’ is implicitly admitting that ‘under-dog’ is, after all, 
a human soul; and this means that the gulf fixed is not a permanently 
impassable one when the distinction between sheep and goats has been 
drawn in terms of religious practice and belief. A soul that has demon¬ 
strated its capacity for Religion by following even a religion that the 
Pharisee rejects as false and bad has at any rate thereby proved itself 
capable of conversion to the alternative religion that the Pharisee regards 
as being exclusively true and good. The ugly line dividing the human 
family into a superior and an inferior fraction could be obliterated 
eventually through the progressive conversion of the whole of heathen¬ 
dom to the Pharisee’s persuasion; and, according to the tenets of most 
of the higher religions, including those of the Buddhaic as well as the 
Judaic school, this is not just a theoretical possibility; it is a practical 
goal which the true believer must do his utmost to help the Church to 
attain, in the pious expectation that these missionary labours will not 
be in vain. 

This potential universality of the Church was symbolized, in the 
visual art of a Western Christendom in its Medieval Age, in the conven¬ 
tion by which one of the three Magi came to be portrayed as a Negro; 2 
and, in the practice of an Early Modern Western Christendom which 
had forced its presence upon all other living human societies by its feat 
of mastering the art of oceanic navigation, the same sense of the Church’s 
universality had shown its sincerity in action in the readiness of the 
Spanish and Portuguese conquistadores to go to all lengths of social 
intercourse, including intermarriage, with bona fide converts to a 
Tridentine Roman Catholic Christianity, without any longer taking 
account either of a transcended difference of religion or of an abiding 
difference of language or race. 1 The Spanish conquerors of Peru and the 
Philippines were so much more eagerly concerned to impart their 
Christian religion than to propagate their Castilian language that they 
endowed the native languages of the conquered peoples with the means 
of resisting the spread of Castilian at their expense by developing these 
languages into vehicles for literary expression in order to convey the 
Catholic Western Christian liturgy and literature to populations that 
spoke these languages as their mother tongues. 4 

1 Luke xviii. 9. * See II. i. 224. » See II. i. 224. 

* In V. v. 523-4 we have already noticed that the Incas’ policy of promoting the use 
of the Quichua language as the lingua franca of an Andean universal state was taken over 



5 66 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 

The readiness of the Early Modern Roman Catholic Christian agents 
in the diffusion of a Western culture to intermarry with their converts 
was impressively attested in the twentieth century of the Christian Era 
by the physical evidence of the mixture of blood in the contemporary 
populations of all ci-devant or subsisting dominions of the Spanish and 
Portuguese empires in which there had been an indigenous population of 
any considerable density at the time of the original conquest. A racial 
amalgam including cross-breeds of every degree from an all but pure 
West European strain to an all but pure indigenous race of the pre- 
Columbian or pre-da Gaman stock was at this date characteristic of the 
populations of the successor-states of the former Spanish Empire of 
the Indies, from Mexico to Bolivia and Paraguay inclusive; and it was 
likewise characteristic of Brazil, Portuguese West and East Africa, Goa, x 
and those coastal districts of Ceylon that had been annexed to an expand¬ 
ing Western Christendom by Portuguese conquerors before they had been 
wrested out of Portuguese hands by the Dutch, and out of Dutch hands 
by the British. 

In thus demonstrating the sincerity of their religious convictions by 
receiving into their society all alien converts to their faith, the Spanish 
and Portuguese pioneers of an expanding Early Modern Christendom 

and carried farther by the Catholic Christian hierarchy in the Spanish Viceroyalty of 
Peru. The corresponding ecclesiastical policy of using native languages, in preference 
to Castilian, as vehicles for the propagation of Christianity in the Philippine Islands is 
noticed by Wyndham, H. A.: Problems oj Imperial Trusteeship: Native Education 
(London 1933, Milford), pp. 103-4. In their single-minded determination to carry out 
their religious mission of instructing the Filipinos in the Tridentinc Catholic Christian 
Faith, the missionary orders in the Philippines persistently and successfully flouted 
the Spanish Crown's order—originally given in a.d. 1550 by Charles V and reiterated 
in 1636, 1770, 1772, 1774 . «md 1792—that the language of religious instruction for 
Filipinos should be Castilian (Wyndham, loc. cit., following Blair, E. H., and Robertson, 
J. A.: The Philippine Islands, 1493-1S93 (Cleveland, Ohio 1903-9, Clark, 55 vols.), 
vol. xxix, p. 265; vol. xxxv, p. 310; vol. xxxvii, p. 104; vol. xxxviii, p. an; vol. xlv, pp. 
184-6, 221, 222; vol. 1, p. 15). 

• In a.d. 1952 it seemed probable that, of the three West European Powers between 
whose empires the whole of Continental India had been partitioned five years back, 
Portugal would be the last to lose her surviving Continental Indian possessions, in spite 
of the fact that in this age Portugal was militarily and politically very much weaker than 
either Great Britain or France. The ground for this expectation was that the decisive 
factor determining the political future of Asiatic countries that had been under Western 
rule was the will of their inhabitants. The British had been led to evacuate India in 
A.D. 1947 by a recognition of, and respect for, a will to political independence among 
their former Indian fellow subjects which had been steadily growing in intensity, and 
had at the same time been captivating an ever larger proportion of the population of 
British Indis, over a period of more than half a century. In a.d. 1952 it looked as if the 
population of the enclaves of French-ruled territory in India would opt for a political 
Cleichschaltung with the majority of their fellow Indians, who by that date had become 
citizens of a fully self-governing and potentially independent Indian Union. Already 
in a.d. 1949 the population of Chandemagore had voted for entry into the Indian 
Union in virtue of an agreement, concluded between the Indian Union and France in 
a.d. 1948, that plebiscites should be held in Pondicherry, Mah<, Chandernagorc, 
Karikal, and Yanaon. The contemporary population of Portuguese India was hardly 
distinguishable in race from the inhabitants of the rest of the sub-continent, since the 
Portuguese blood that had been infused into the veins of the Goanese in the course of 
some four and a half centuries was no more than a tincture. This tincture, however, was 
significant, not in virtue of its physical strength, but because it was an outward visible 
sign of an inward spiritual union which the Portuguese conquerors of Goa had con¬ 
summated with a conquered native Indian population that had embraced the conquerors’ 
religion. In A.D. 1952 it remained to be seen whether the community of religion that 
was a voluntary bond between Goa and Portugal might not prove morally stronger than 
the community of race and the geographical contiguity that would tend to attract the 
tiny territory of Goa towards the mighty mass of an encompassing India. 



DEHUMANIZATION 567 

had been anticipated by the Muslims, who, from the outset, had inter¬ 
married with their converts, without regard to differences of race. The 
Primitive Muslim Arab conquerors of the Sasanian Empire and Trans- 
oxania were not deterred from mingling their blood with the blood of 
their converted Persian and Turkish subjects by their consciousness of 
the physical difference between these Northerners’ unattractive rud¬ 
diness 1 and the comely swarthiness of their own noble Arab breed; 2 
and in a later age a ruddy-cheeked and auburn-haired Ottoman Turkish 
Muslim empire-builder who had accentuated the peculiarities of his 
pristine Turkish physique by intermarriage with Orthodox Christian 
and Western Christian renegades of European provenance would 
demonstrate his abiding loyalty to his adopted Islamic faith by also 
intermarrying, not only with his unattractively swarthy Arabic-speaking 
Muslim subjects, but even with the repulsively black-skinned and 
frizzle-haired Sudanese, when once these uncouth barbarians had re¬ 
deemed their physical and cultural defects in the 'Osmanli’s eyes by 
embracing the true faith of Islam. 1 

The Islamic Society had also inherited, from a precept enshrined and 
consecrated in texts of the Qur’an by the Prophet Muhammad himself, 
a recognition that there were certain non-Islamic religions which, in 
spite of their inadequacy by comparison with Islam, were authentic 
partial revelations of divine truth and goodness. In the pre-Islamic 
‘Days of Ignorance’, these broken lights 4 of God’s countenance 5 had 
been, in Muhammad’s eyes, the brightest lights shining in an uncom¬ 
prehending darkness; 6 and, on this view, they would have continued to 
be the best means yet vouchsafed by God to Man for his salvation if they 
had not been superseded in the fullness of time by a complete and de¬ 
finitive revelation in the shape of Islam. The affinity with Islam that 
was to be recognized in Judaism and Christianity as two morning stars 
preceding and heralding an Islamic sunrise was acknowledged in the 
Islamic ecclesiastical vocabulary by the bestowal of the name ‘People of 
the Book’ ( Ahl-al-KitSb ) on communities possessing a Torah and a 
Gospel which, in the Prophet Muhammad’s theophany, were divinely 
revealed prefaces to the Qur’ 3 n; and this Islamic recognition of the 
validity of the Jewish and Christian faiths up to the limits of their im¬ 
perfect spiritual illumination carried with it a political corollary. The 
Islamic Shari'ah declared that, when once any non-Muslims who were 
‘People of the Book’ had submitted to Muslim rule and had agreed to 
pay a surtax to the Islamic state in token of their submission and in 
return for a Muslim guarantee of their security, this transaction con¬ 
ferred on these dhimmis a right to be protected by the Muslim ‘ascen¬ 
dancy’ without being required to renounce their inherited non-Muslim 
faith. 7 

* The Arabs’ use of the term hamrd’ as a depreciatory epithet for their northerly 
subjects is noticed by Al-Balidhuri in his Kitdb Futuh al-Bulddn (see the English 
translation published by the Columbia University Press, vol. i (19x6) p. 441, and Part II 

(* aa6. . * See ibid., pp. 226-7. 

* Tennyson: In Memoriam, Invocation, stanza 5. 

5 Job xxix. 24 and Psalm iv. 6. 4 Johni. 5. 

^ See II. ii. 245; IV. iv. 225-6; V. v. 674-5; v * *° 4 - 5 - 



568 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 

A privilege which had perhaps been confined originally to the Jews 
and Christians and Sabians was tacitly extended, in the event, to cover 
not only the Zoroastrians 1 but also even the polytheistic and idolatrous 
Hindus; so that in practice the Muslims came to recognize that the 
adherents of all other higher religions had a moral claim to be tolerated 
by the followers of Islam on the implicit ground that they too, in their 
degree, had been recipients of revelation from the One True God. This 
treatment de facto as ‘People of the Book’, which the Zoroastrians and 
Hindus enjoyed in Dar-al-Islam, was accorded to the Jews in Christen¬ 
dom; 2 for, though the status was not recognized de jure in the canon law 
of the Christian Church, it was no more possible for Christianity than 
it was for Islam to cut the ground of its own moral claims to theological 
validity from under its own feet by proscribing another higher religion 
which was not only older than it was, but was its forerunner according to 
its own contention. 3 

The positive attitude, manifested in this Islamic concept of ‘People 
of the Book’, towards another religion that can be recognized as being 
spiritually akin to one’s own, has its antithesis in a negative attitude 
manifested in the Christian concepts of ‘schismatics’ and ‘heretics’. 
From this antithetical negative standpoint the spiritual affinity with the 
Church that is displayed by a community which is nevertheless beyond 
the Church’s pale is not a merit carrying a title to toleration; it is a per¬ 
versity calling for extirpation by physical force if persuasion cannot 
wean these lost souls away from their provocative sin against the light. 
An Islam which had succeeded in rising to a spiritually higher level in 
its attitude towards non-Islamic ‘People of the Book’ descended to the 
prevailing Christian level in its attitude towards enemies that were men 
of its own house. 4 The feud within the bosom of Islam between a usually 
dominant majority which eulogized its own version of the True Faith 
by calling it ‘the Beaten Track (SunnaJi)’, while it denigrated its usually 
down-trodden minoritarian opponents’ version by calling it ‘the Sect 
(ShVah)', came to display all the rancour, violence, and cruelty that, in 
a prc-Islamic Christendom, had been displayed in the successive feuds 
between Catholics and Gnostics, Trinitarians and Arians, Christolatrists 
and Ncstorians, Mclchites and Monophysites; and Christendom, for 
its part, remained blind to the import of the disaster that had been the 
penalty of a fratricidal civil war when a Christian house divided against 
itself by the Melchite-Monophysite feud had fallen 5 at one blow from 
a Muslim sword. If this lesson had been read and taken to heart by the 
Christians of the seventh century of their era, Christians of subsequent 
centuries might not have had the face to revive the Christian scandals of 

* See the Qur'in, Surah xxii. 17, quoted in V. v. 674, n. 2. 

1 See pj>. 272-313, above. 

> The historical and theological relation of Christianity to Judaism explains why the 
Christian Church never extended its tacit toleration of Judaism to an Islam which was 
in one aspect a post-Christian reversion to Judaism from Christianity. In the Christian 
view the tolerance morally due to a truly though imperfectly inspired pre-Christian 
approximation towards Christianity could not properly be extended to a perverse back¬ 
sliding from the Christian summit of religious attainment. 

4 Micah vii. 6; Matt. x. 21 and 35-36; Mark xiii. 12; and Luke xxi. t6. 

5 Matt. xii. 25; Mark iii. 24-25; and Luke xi. 17. 


DEHUMANIZATION 569 

a pre-Islamic age of Christian history in the latter-day feuds between 
Eastern Orthodox Christians and Western Catholics and between 
Roman Catholics and Protestants within the fold of a Western Church 
which, in contemporary Eastern Orthodox eyes, was uniformly schis¬ 
matic in its Protestant as well as in its Roman aberration. 

Apart from this stiJT-necked refusal to admit that their professed 
principles of toleration were applicable to their family quarrels, the 
followers of higher religions of Judaic origin could not always bring 
themselves to apply these principles in practice to the believers in other 
Judaic faiths. The Western Christian barbarian conquerors of the 
Iberian Peninsula gave the subjugated Jews, as well as the subjugated 
Muslims, a choice in which the grim three proffered options of annihila¬ 
tion, expulsion, and conversion to Christianity were substituted for 
Christendom’s traditional offer, to the Jews in her midst, of toleration 
at the price of penalization;* and, when the progeny of the Jews who had 
chosen to profess conversion in Spain in preference to exile, or who had 
been constrained to profess conversion in Portugal as the only way left 
open to them there of escaping death, came to prosper in the Christian 
community which they had thus entered under duress, the envy of their 
non-Semitic compatriots and co-religionists found vent in witch-hunts 
whose victims forfeited their property and were put to death by the 
fiendishly cruel torment of burning them alive if they were convicted of 
having remained crypto-Jews or having secretly embraced some heretical 
form of Christianity. 

We have still to take note of the greatest intellectual and moral in¬ 
consistency of all in the conduct of ‘top-dog’ towards ‘under-dog’ when 
‘top-dog’s’ denial of ‘under-dog’s’ humanity has taken the form of 
asserting his religious nullity. The free passage from one ecclesiastical 
allegiance to another, as a sequel to becoming convinced of the spiritual 
superiority of the religion to which the spiritual pilgrim’s loyalty is being 
transferred, had always been ‘a one-way street’ under the ecclesiastical 
by-laws of the dominant religious party. In Islamic customary practice, 
for example, a meritorious conversion that was rewarded with the 
guerdon of a genuinely unreserved admission into the bosom of the 
Islamic body social took on the polar aspect of an abominable apostasy 
whose inexorable penalty was death if ever it was a question of a Muslim 
seeing the light in some other religion, and following this new light that 
he saw to the non-Islamic goal to which it led. Inconsistency, injustice, 
and intolerance are the inevitable fruits of inhumanity in all its forms; 
yet the relative innocuousness of inhumanity in the form of religious 
discrimination becomes apparent when we observe the noxiousness of its 
effects in the lower forms to which it is capable of descending. 

The next least noxious form of ‘top-dog’s’ denial of ‘under-dog’s’ 
humanity is an assertion of ‘under-dog’s’ cultural nullity in a society 
that has broken out of a traditional religious chrysalis and has translated 

* See II. ii. 244. This threefold choice was the ultimatum presented to the Castilian 
Jews in A.D. 1391 and A.D. 1492. The choice placed before the Portuguese Jews in a.d. 
1497 was one between the two harsher alternatives only; they were not given the option 
of going into exile (see II. ii. 247, n. 3.). 



570 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
its values into secular terms. In the history of the cultural aggression 
of the civilizations of the second generation, this was the connotation of 
the distinction drawn by members of an Hellenic Society between 
‘Hellenes’ and ‘Barbarians’, 1 and by members of a Sinic Society between 
their cultivated selves and the miserable ‘E’ who still languished in 
outer darkness on the fringes of a Sinic World which, in Sinic belief, 
was the unique treasure-house of ‘Civilization’ with a capital ‘C’. In 
a Late Modern Western World this cultural dichotomy of Mankind 
into ‘civilized people’ and ‘barbarians’ had found exponents in the 
French, who had half-consciously revived or half-spontaneously re¬ 
conceived this Hellenic concept in working out their relations with the 
North American Indians in the eighteenth century, with the Maghribis 
and Annamcsc in the nineteenth century, and with the Negro peoples 
of the French African Empire south of the Sahara in the twentieth cen¬ 
tury of the Christian Era. In the same Late Modem Age of Western 
history the same attitude had been adopted by the Dutch in their rela¬ 
tions with the Malay peoples of Indonesia. In the Cape Province of 
South Africa, Cecil Rhodes had sought to kindle the same cultural 
ideal in the hearts of his Dutch-speaking and English-speaking fellow 

« In the Hellenic usage of this pair of antithetical terms the dichotomy of Mankind for 
which the terms stood in the fifth century b.c. and in all subsequent ages of Hellenic 
history except the last age of all was a distinction between people who led and people 
who did not lead the Hellenic way of life as this was lived in whatever the age might be. 
In this established classical usage of the terms the criterion by which a human being or 
community was numbered either among the Hellenic sheep or among the barbarian 
goats was cultural, not religious or linguistic. 

The Aetolian, Epirot, Macedonian, and Paconian Greek-speaking barbarians in 
Continental European Greece to the west of the Ozolian Locris and to the west and north 
of Thessaly were not accepted as Hellenes in this prevailing cultural sense until the post- 
Alexandrine Age, and it was not til! the penultimate phase of Hellenic history, in which 
the Hellenic World was united politically in a universal state established by Latin¬ 
speaking empire-builders, that the most northerly of these barbarians with a Greek 
mother tongue—the Agrianes and Dentheletae round the headwaters of the rivere 
Strymon (Struma) and Oescus (Isker)—were brought within the fold of the Hellenic 
culture by its latter-day non-Greek-speaking Roman propagators whose forebears had 
graduated as masters of Hellenic arts in the generation of Titus Quinctius Flamininus 
in the early years of the second century B.c. On the other hand there were non-Greek- 
speaking peoples—first and foremost the Carians and the Lycians at the south-east 
comer of the Aegean Basin—who had been Hellenes in the cultural sense since the 
earliest date at which a distinctively Hellenic culture had been discernible. This non- 
conterminousness of the area in which the Greek language was spoken and the area 
in which the Hellenic way of life was lived has already been noticed in other contexts 
(see III. iii. 478; V. v. 484; and pp. 412-14, above). 

In origin, however, the term ‘barbaros’ was an onomatopoeic word signifying the 
speaker of a language that sounded like gibberish to ears attuned to Greek, and it still 
bears the linguistic meaning suggested by its etymology in the Homeric phrase Kaptt 
Pap8ap6$ojioi (Iliad, Book II, 1 .867). The term ‘Hellin', again, originally denoted, not 
a follower of the Greek way of life, but a citizen of some one of a number of political 
communities that enioyed the privilege of membership in a local religious association 
of the friends, neighbours, and patrons ('Amphictyones’I of a pair of shrines in the 
central segment of European Greece: the temple of the Anthelan Artemis at Thermo¬ 
pylae and the temple of the Pythian Apollo at Delphi. It is noteworthy that, in the last 
phase of Hellenic history, the antithesis between Hellene and Barbarian reacquired the 
religious connotation that had been the word ‘Hellan’s’ original significance. The Greek- 
writing Early Christian Fathers’ self-consciously defiant laudatory use of the word 
‘barbarian’ to denote a Jewish and Christian religious revelation that was to supersede 
the Hellenic philosophy proved to be too bizarre a tour de force to establish itself; but, 
after the official conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity, the term ‘Hellene’ 
eventually came to signify, in Christian Greek parlance, a crank whose notion of loyalty 
to the Hellenic culture took the perversely religious form of clinging to some pre- 
Christian form of Paganism. 



DEHUMANIZATION 57 * 

Whites when he had coined his slogan ‘Equal rights for every civilized 
man south of the Zambesi’. 1 

In South Africa this spark of idealism had been smothered, after the 
establishment of the Union in a.d. 1910, by the eruption of a narrow- 
hearted and violent-minded Afrikander Dutch Nationalism which, not 
content with waging a fratricidal linguistic warfare against the English- 
speaking members of a dominant minority of West European provenance, 
was also bent on asserting its ascendancy over its South African 
fellow countrymen of Bantu, Indonesian, and Indian origin in the name 
of a superiority to which the Afrikander laid claim on the score neither 
of his Early Modern Western culture nor of his Calvinist religion but of 
his Nordic race. The French, on the other hand, had gone to impressive 
lengths in giving political effect to their cultural convictions. 1 

Even in the Maghrib—where, as in South Africa, public policy was 
constrained to accommodate itself to the ambivalently hostile feelings 
of a dominant minority of West European origin that was fearful of be¬ 
ing swamped by a native majority which it not only feared but also 
despised—the acquisition of full French citizenship had been open since 
a.d. 1865 to native Algerian subjects of the Islamic faith on condition of 
their acquiescing in the jurisdiction of the French civil law which the 
status of full French citizenship automatically imposed on its recipients. 
It is true that the French ‘ascendancy’s’ insistence on the maintenance 
of this condition ensured, as it was intended to ensure, that the number 
of MaghribI French subjects applying for full French citizenship should 


1 When challenged to define hi* phrase 'civilized man’ in the course of the debate on 
the third reading of the Glen Grey Bill in the Cape of Good Hope House of Assembly, 
Rhodes is reported to have responded by declaring on the 9th August, 1894,. that he 
meant ‘a man, whether Black or White, who has sufficient education to write his name, 
has some property, or works—in fact is not a loafer' (sec McDonald, J. G.: Rhodes, 
A Life (London 1927, Philip Allen), p. 171). In his speech during the debate on the 
second reading of the Glen Grey Bill, Rhodes is reported to have said: ‘We fail utterly 
when we put natives on an equality with ourselves.... What we may expect after a hun¬ 
dred years of civilization, I do not know. If I may venture a comparison, I would com¬ 
pare the natives generally, with regard to European Civilization, to fellow-tribesmen of 
the Druids, and just suppose that they were come to life after the two thousand years 
which have elapsed since their existence. That is the position’ ('Vindex': Cecil Rhodes, 
His Political Life and Speeches, 1SS1-1900 (London 1900, Chapman & Hall), p. 379). 

Neither of these passages is to be found in the Cape of Good Hope 'Hansard' entitled 
Debates in the House of Assembly in the First Session of the Ninth Parliament of the Cape 
of Good Hope, 17th May to 18th August, 1894 (Cape Town 1894, 'Cape Times’ Printing 
Works), in which the context of the words reported by ‘Vindex’ appears on p. 364, 
col. 2, as part of Rhodes' speech of the 26th July [not the 30th July, which is the date 
given by 'Vindex'] on the second reading, while the debate on the third reading is 
reported there on pp. 464, col. 2, to 470, col. 1. But this non-appearance of Rhodes’ 
alleged words in 'Hansard' does not, of course, constitute a disproof of their authenticity. 

In his speech in the House of Representatives on the 26th July, 1894, as reported in 
‘Hansard’, Rhodes is represented as saying that 'he had based all his replies on the 
understanding that, in so far as brains, the Natives were different’ (p. 369, col. x). 
This apparent profession of a belief in the existence of insurmountable intellectual 
differences correlated with physical differences seems to be in contradiction with a 
reference (reported on a lower line of the same column) to 'this barbarian or this gentle¬ 
man who had just emerged from barbarism’ and with an earlier statement (reported 
on p. 367, col. 1) that Rhodes 'thought they might first allow those children just emerged 
from barbarism to manage their own local affairs’. In the adjourned debate on the second 
reading of the Bill on the 2nd August, he is represented in 'Hansard’ (p. 418, col. 1) 
as talking of ‘the second stage of the Natives—that was, when they were emerging from 
pure barbarism, as compared with the third stage, when they were, apart from colour, 
apparently the same as the Whites'. This last-quoted passage has a decidedly French or 
Roman flavour. a See II. i. 223. 



572 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
be negligibly small, since a submission lo the French civil law was 
incompatible with the retention of an Islamic ‘personal statute’ which 
few Maghrib! Muslims in that age were willing to renounce. The opposi¬ 
tion of the West European colonists in French North-West Africa proved 
powerful enough, during the interval between the two world wars, to 
prevent the passage through the parliament in Paris of legislation for 
enabling an elite of culturally voluds Muslim native Algerian French 
subjects to acquire full French citizenship without their any longer being 
required to sacrifice their Islamic ‘personal statute’ 1 as the purchase price 
of this political privilege; and it was not till the 7th March, 1944, that 
the Algerian Muslims were granted exemption from having to fulfil this, 
for them, all but prohibitive condition in virtue of an ordinance adopted 
on that date by the French Committee of National Liberation. 2 

This ordinance conferred full French citizenship, without forfeiture 
of Islamic 'personal statute’, on Algerian Muslim French subjects falling 
within certain specified categories, 3 and provided for their registration 
on the same electoral lists as their non-Muslim fellow citizens, while 
all other Algerian Muslim adult males were enrolled in electoral colleges 
empowered to elect two-fifths of the members of the Algerian General 
Assembly and departmental and municipal councils, except in those 
municipalities in which the Muslims constituted less than two-fifths of 
the local population—where proportionate reductions in their communal 
representation were to be made. The ordinance of the 7th March, 1944, 
also proclaimed the abolition of all discrimination between Muslims 
and non-Muslims in Algeria; and the quota of Muslim scats on 
Algerian public bodies was raised from 40 per cent, to 50 per cent, 
by the terms of the French Constitution promulgated on the 27th 
October, 1946, though this concession to Algerian Muslim French 
subjects was offset by the simultaneous doubling of the numbers of 
the non-Muslim French electors in Algeria as an automatic conse¬ 
quence of the enfranchisement of female non-Muslim (but not female 
Muslim) French nationals. Thereafter, the Statute of Algeria, passed 
by the Parliament in Paris on the 1st September, 1947, transformed the 
former Financial Delegations in Algeria into a Financial Assembly in 

* Sec Toynbee, A. J., and Boulter, V. M.: Survey of International Affairs, 1937, voJ. i 
(London 1938, Milford), pp. 496-7 and 5x1-27. This abortive French inter-war legisla¬ 
tion had a notable precedent in the Roman practice of allowing Jewish Roman subjects 
to become Roman citizens without renouncing the observance of the Law of Moses. The 
Jews of the Roman Empire were accorded this politic exceptional privilege by the Roman 
Imperial Government because—like the Muslim, and unlike the Jewish, indigenous 
French subjects in the Maghrib—the Jews, alone among the multifarious subjects of 
Rome, had shown themselves unwilling to purchase the political treasure of citizenship 
at the religious price of renouncing their hereditary ‘personal statute’ (Toynbee, op. 
cit., vol. cit., p. 496, n. x, and d. 497, n. 5). 

1 See Kirk, George: The Middle East in the War (London 1953, Cumberlege), Part 
HI (Viii) (#), p. 422, in the Survey of International Affairs, 1939-1946. 

» The members of these categories amounted to at least 60,000 persons in all, as 
against the 7,817 Algerian Muslims who had possessed French citizenship in A.D. 1936. 
There were, however, about 400,000 non-Muslim French citizens entitled to vote in 
the national parliamentary elections in the three Algerian Departments of France (Kirk, 
op. cit., p. 422) .while, according to the Algerian census of the 8th March, 1936. the 
total number of French citizens of European origin in the three Algerian Departments 
at that date had amounted to not more than 978,297 out of a total population, in these 
three Departments, of 6,592,033 (Toynbee and Boulter, op. cit., p. 491, n. 1, and p. 
493 )- 



DEHUMANIZATION 573 

which French citizens and French subjects were to be represented in 
equal numbers; but the last word remained, as before, with the Governor- 
General. 

Meanwhile in Tropical Africa, where French public policy did not 
have to contend with the pride and fear of European colonists, it had 
been carried by this time to its logical conclusion in individual cases 
which were as striking as they were rare. 

The sincerity of the French in acting on their ideal of opening all 
political and social doors in France and the French Empire to anyone 
who had successfully graduated in the French version of a Late Modern 
Western culture was demonstrated, within the present writer’s lifetime, 
by an incident which, in vindicating the honour of France, had an 
appreciable effect on the outcome of the World War of a . d . 1939-45. 
In the phase of this war that followed the fall of France in June 1940, it 
was a question of great moment whether Marshal Petain’s Government 
at Vichy or the Free French Movement temporarily based on Great Britain 
would succeed in rallying to its cause the strategically and economically 
important French territories beyond the limits of a temporarily prostrate 
European France. At this critical juncture the Governor of the Chad 
Province of French Equatorial Africa was a French citizen of Negro 
African race, Monsieur Fdlix Eboud; this Negro African Frenchman by 
cultural adoption duly exercised the political responsibility attaching to 
his post in the French public sendee by opting in favour of General de 
Gaulle; and the moral effect of his lead on the hearts and minds of his 
European French colleagues as well as his African French kith and kin 
produced the momentous political result of giving the Free French 
Movement its first foothold in the French Empire in Africa. 

This French example shows that the cultural as well as the religious 
criterion for drawing the inhuman distinction between ‘top-dog’ and 
‘under-dog’ is a form of denying ‘under-dog’s’ humanity that does not 
fix an impassable gulf between the two fractions into which it artificially 
divides the human family. On the acid test of ‘top-dog’s’ reaction to the 
question of intermarriage with his alleged inferiors on the other side of 
his arbitrarily drawn dividing line, the response of French agnostics in 
Africa and Dutch Protestants in Indonesia 1 was no less positive than 
that of Portuguese Catholics at Goa and Creole Catholics in Mexico; 
and, in both cases alike, this transcendence of a sexual tabu was proved 
to be a genuine fruit of humane feeling, and not just a surrender to the 
demon of physical incontinence, by the favourableness of the social 
status accorded to the children born of these unions, including those 
begotten out of lawful wedlock. At the same time, it is evident that this 


1 The contrast between the relative liberalism of the Dutch in Indonesia and the 
extreme inhumanity of their kinsmen in South Africa in their attitude towards ‘under¬ 
dog* is a striking example of the variability in the character of the local responses to a 
challenge in diverse local circumstances. The same contrast was illustrated at the same 
date by a similar difference in the attitudes of British temporary resident officials and 
British would-be permanent settlers in Kenya; and wc have already observed that even 
the French, Spanish, and Italian settlers in French North-West Africa were not saved 
by the comparative humanity of their Catholic and Roman traditions from lapsing into 
an Afrikander-like attitude towards the Muslim indigenous Algerian population upon 
whose homeland this immigrant West European minority had intruded. 



574 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 

right of way across an inhuman gulf will not be guaranteed in such 
explicit terms by a cultural as it will be by a religious passport. 

The right to exchange one higher religion for another was ensured in 
theory—however flagrantly this theory might be flouted in practice—in 
virtue of the convention that a soul’s allegiance even to the church into 
which it had been born had been contracted, not by the involuntary 
physical experience of birth, but by a voluntary act of spiritual affiance. 
A male child born of Muslim parents obtained its initiation into member¬ 
ship of the Islamic Church by undergoing the rite of circumcision at 
puberty, while a daughter as well as a son of Christian parents obtained 
her initiation into membership of the Christian Church by a rite of 
baptism in which the voluntariness of the declarations and undertakings 
by which this physical rite was accompanied was signified in the 
appointment of godparents to speak on the infant’s behalf words imply¬ 
ing an exercise of free will that was not practicable for a human being 
till she had arrived at the years of discretion. In contrast to this theory 
that an ancestral religion is adopted by a personal act of free choice, it 
is impossible even to pretend that the way of life in which a child is 
educated is not inculcated as a habit before the pupil has had a chance of 
saying ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to it; and a culture which has thus ex hypothesi been 
imposed must be presumed to be less easy to change than a religion that 
has ex hypothesi been chosen. On this showing, the patently involuntary 
‘Barbarian’ was a less promising subject for conversion than the 
reputedly deliberate ‘Unbeliever’. The decisive downward step, how¬ 
ever, in ‘top-dog’s’ descensus Averni is not the change from ‘Unbeliever’ 
to ‘Barbarian’, but the change from ‘Barbarian’ to ‘Native’, in the defini¬ 
tion of the stigma by means of which the oppressor seeks to rob his 
victim of an inalienable humanity. 

In stigmatizing the members of an alien society as ‘Natives’ of their 
homes, ‘top-dog’ is denying their humanity by asserting their political 
and economic nullity. While admitting the indisputable fact that he has 
found them already in possession at the time of his own appearance on 
the scene, he is making this admission without conceding that these 
‘Natives” mere priority of occupation gives them any title, either legal 
or moral, as against himself. By designating them as ‘Natives’ sans 
phrase, he is implicitly assimilating them to the non-human fauna and 
flora of a virgin 'New World’ that has been waiting for its predatory 
and acquisitive latest human discoverers to enter in and take possession 
in virtue of a right of ‘eminent domain’ over a ‘Promised Land’ deemed 
to be in the gift of some war-goddess of Private Enterprise. On these 
premises the fauna and flora of the wilderness may be regarded by the 
human pioneer in one or other of two alternative lights. Either he may 
treat them as vermin and weeds to be extirpated in order to clear the 
ground for stocking it with cattle or cultivating it for crops, or alter¬ 
natively he may treat them as valuable natural resources to be carefully 
conserved and efficiently exploited. The pioneer’s choice of economic 
policy will be determined partly by his estimate of the value of the 
natural environment and partly by his own temperament; but, whatever 
the policy that he may elect to adopt, and whatever the considerations 



DEHUMANIZATION 575 

or feelings by which he may be prompted, he will be acting in any event 
on the assumption that he is morally at liberty to pursue his own best 
interests as he sees them, without being called upon to treat the ‘Natives’ 
as anything but wolves to be exterminated or sheep to be shorn. 

In previous contexts 1 we have found the classical practitioners of this 
abominable social philosophy in those Eurasian Nomad hordes that had 
succeeded occasionally in establishing their rule over conquered seden¬ 
tary populations. In their treatment of militarily routed fellow human 
beings as if they were either game or livestock, the Ottoman empire- 
builders were both as ruthlessly and as sublimely logical as the French 
empire-builders were in their treatment of their subjects as barbarians; 
and, while it was true that unemancipated French subjects were vastly 
better off than the Ottoman ra’iyeh, it was also true that a human 
domestic animal which an ‘Osmanli shepherd of men had successfully 
trained into becoming an efficient human sheep-dog found open to his 
talents an even more brilliant career than awaited the African ivolui 
when he succeeded in becoming a French official or man of letters. 

This parallel brings out the fact that, even when ‘under-dog’ is 
stigmatized as a ‘Native’, it is not impossible for him, within ‘top-dog’s’ 
repressive social system, to cross the line dividing the human chattel 
from the man of property. The American Negro colonists of Liberia, 
whose African forebears had been not merely subjugated but uprooted, 
enslaved, and deported across the Atlantic, had raised themselves to the 
status of honorary Lords of Creation by acquiring unuprooted African 
‘Native’ subjects of their own in the hinterland of the strip of West 
African coast on which these Negro American freedmen had been in¬ 
stalled in the nineteenth century of the Christian Era by White American 
philanthropists. Subjugated Scottish Highlanders who had been treated 
as ‘Natives’ by their more recently disembarked Sassenach fellow 
islanders within two hundred years of the time of writing, and sub¬ 
jugated Maoris who had received the same treatment from the still more 
recent West European settlers in New Zealand within a hundred years 
of the same date, had succeeded in the meantime in transforming them¬ 
selves en masse from ‘Natives’ into joint heirs of their own expropriated 
kingdoms. 2 

If it is thus possible for people to raise themselves from the depressed 
status of an effectively subjugated ‘Native’ population, this feat of self¬ 
emancipation is less difficult for people on whose necks this inhuman 
yoke has not yet been firmly fixed. In the social etiquette of the Modern 
Western World there was a tacit convention that 'Natives’ had to be 
recognized as being human after all if and when they succeeded in acquir¬ 
ing the economic technique, or, a fortiori , the military armaments, that 
were the credentials of a Modern Western Great Power. ‘Natives’ and 
‘Powers’ were mutually exclusive concepts for Modern Western minds, 
and the exigency of this Modern Western way of thinking promptly 
liberated a post-Pctrine Russia from the stigma of the opprobrious 

• See, for example, I. i. 151-2 ar.d III. iii. 22-50. 

* See II. i. 227,238, and 466, and V. v. 322-3 for the transformation of the Highlanders, 
and V. v. 322 for the similar transformation of the Maoris. 



S76 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
brious epithet, whereas the Russians’ Orthodox Christian co-rcligionists 
who were the ‘Osmanlis’ ra'iyeh continued to be known as ‘Native 
Christians’ in Western Christian parlance till they succeeded, in the 
course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries of the Christian Era, 
in carving out sovereign independent successor-states for themselves. 
In virtue of the same principle of Western power politics the Japanese 
ceased to be ‘Natives’ after the inauguration of the Meiji Era in a.d. 
1868, while the Chinese continued to be 'Natives’ until they gradually 
extricated themselves from the same status pari passu with the progres¬ 
sive abrogation of ‘the Unequal Treaties’ after the First World War. 

In the Late Modern Age of Western history the English-speaking 
Protestant West European pioneers of the Western Society’s expansion 
overseas had been the worst offenders in committing the Nomad empire- 
builders’ sin of making 'Natives’ out of alien human souls; and, in this 
repetition of an old crime by a new criminal, the most sinister feature had 
been the English-speaking peoples’ pronencss to go over the edge of a 
further downward step' to which the ‘Osmanlis had never descended. 
These West European 'Lords of Creation’ had been apt to clinch their 
assertion of their victims’ political and economic nullity by going on to 
stigmatize these ‘Natives’ as the spawn of ‘inferior races’. 1 

» This moral lapse had recorded itself in a linguistic medium in the discrepancies 
between the literal meaning of the phrase 'the English-speaking peoples’, the connota¬ 
tion of the term in its users minds, and the actual current usage of it. The connotation 
was that the cream of the common heritage of the peoples speaking this West European 
vernacular as their mother-tongue was not a mere community of speech but was a com¬ 
munity of political ideals and achievements—above all, parliamentary government, civil 
liberty, and a respect for human personality which was the moral foundation of these 
social institutions. On the other hand, the actual current usage belied this connotation 
by tacitly leaving outside the English-speaking family circle those English-speaking 
citizens of the United States whose physique denounced them as being Negroes of 
African provenance. 

2 The Protestant background of a Modem Western race-feeling has been examined in 
II. i. 211—27. In this context it has been pointed out that, though this moral and intel¬ 
lectual aberration was inspired by an interpretation of the Pentateuch ( bic., pp. au¬ 
ra), this latter-day Protestant Western Christian reading of the Hebrew Scriptures had 
no warrant in the traditional attitude of the Jews, whose consciousness of being distinct 
from, and superior to, the rest of Mankind was founded on a belief that they were a 
‘Chosen People’ in virtue of an historic Covenant made with Abraham by the One True 
God, and not on a belief that they were scions of an aboriginally and indefeasibly 
superior physical race (ibid., pp. 246—7J. The recognition that their enjoyment of their 
privilege was contingent on their keeping their part of a contract between themselves 
and God helped the Jews to resist their perpetual temptation to succumb to the sin of 
hybris (as Kipling realized when he wrote the fourth stanza of his Recessional), while 
the substitution 01 the optional physical rite of circumcision for the involuntary physical 
imprint of race as the outward visible sign of membership in the Jewish Church made it 
possible for Jewry to admit ei-devani Gentiles as proselytes. The Jews themselves never 
fell into their Protestant Western Christian parodists’ error of ascribing a rigidly racial 
significance to the historic distinction between 'the seed of Abraham’ and 'the Goyyim’ 
till the Zionists caught this psychic infection from their Nazi persecutors. 

The true forerunners of the latter-day Western racialists were not the ‘Semitic’ 
strangers in their midst whose traditional attitude towards the Gentiles was mis¬ 
represented in this Gentile caricature of it. The first authentic racialists known to history 
were those Aryan barbarian speakers of an Indo-European language who had broken 
into the domains of the Sumeric Civilization in South-West Asia and the Indus Culture 
in North-West India in the second quarter of the second millennium B.c. The curse of 
Racialism was inflicted on India by this Aryan Vfllkenvanderung for the same reason 
that explains its infliction on North America by the African Negro slave-trade. Both 
these great wrongs perpetrated by the strong against the weak had the social effect of 
suddenly bringing human beings of conspicuously diverse physique into intimate 
physical contact with one another in political and economic circumstances in which the 
representatives of one of the races were dominant, while the representatives of the other 



DEHUMANIZATION 577 

Of the four stigmata with which ‘under-dog’ had been branded by 
‘top-dog’, this stigma of racial inferiority was the most malignant, and 
this for three reasons . 1 In the first place it was an assertion of ‘under¬ 
dog’s’ nullity as a human being without any qualification, whereas the 
appellations ‘Heathen’, ‘Barbarian’, and ‘Native’, libellous and injurious 
though they might be, were merely denials of this or that human 
quality and refusals of this or that corresponding human right . 2 In 
the second place this racial dichotomy of Mankind differed from all 
the religious, cultural, and politico-economic dichotomies alike in 
fixing a gulf that was an impassable one 5 —at least in the belief of the 

race were at this racially alien ‘ascendancy’s’ mercy. Thus, in hailing the Aryas as their 
authorities for a policy of persecuting 'non-Aryans’ on the score of their racial diversity 
from the Indo-European-speaking barbarians of Western Europe, the Nazis showed 
themselves better students of History than those Pilgrim Fathers who had cited the 
Israelites as their authorities for exterminating the ’Canaanite’ Natives of a New World 
(see II. i. 211-12 and 465-7). 

Those English pioneers of Western Christendom’s expansion overseas whose ships 
carried them to India instead of North America virtually adopted the institution of 
caste which a Hindu Society had inherited from its Indie predecessor (see pp. 207-13. 
above). If they had been asked to justify themselves by showing reason why they should 
not suffer the same condemnation as the Nazis, the last generation of the English 
’ascendancy' in India would perhaps have pleaded that they had not embraced a doc¬ 
trine of Racialism deliberately and selfconsciously, but had merely succumbed in¬ 
sensibly and involuntarily to the effects of an Indian social atmosphere that had proved 
too potent for them to resist; and this line of defence might have secured them their 
acquittal if the Indian descendants of previous Muslim conquerors of the Hindu World 
had not confuted their English successors’ specious plea by the accomplished fact of 
their Muslim sires’ intermarriage with their Hindu converts. This Indian Muslim feat 
of breaking the bonds of caste was a conclusive proof that an endemic Hindu Racialism 
had no power to prevail, even on its own Indian ground, over the humanity of the 
votaries of a Judaic religion that preached the brotherhood of Man as a corollary of its 
belief in a common fatherhood of God which was all men’s birthright. The Arab, 
Turkish, and Afghan Muslim conquerors of India had all been Whites, and the Turks 
and Afghans had been of the same fair variety of the breed as India’s English invaders 
from Western Europe and her Aryan invaders from the Eurasian Steppe. On this show¬ 
ing, English Christian virtue ought not to have been worsted by a challenge to which 
Afghan Muslim virtue had responded with a sincerity which an impartial English 
Christian observer was bound to admire. Moreover, the nineteenth-century and 
twentieth-century Englishman in India ought to have found his Christian virtue come 
more easily to him considering that he was only a pilgrim sojourning in India as in 
a strange country (Hcb. xi. 13 and 9) where he had no intention of finding a permanent 
home for himself and his offspring. The challenge presented by the geographical inter¬ 
mingling of peoples of conspicuously diverse race was more formidable for the White 
citizen of the United States, and far more formidable for the White citizens of South 
Africa, Southern Rhodesia, or Kenya, where the Whites, instead of constituting, as in 
the United States, an overwhelming majority of the population, were heavily out¬ 
numbered by the Negro 'Natives’. It will be appreciated that the Indian Muslims had 
always been in the predicament of these White settlers in Black Africa. 

* The second and third of these points have been noticed already in II. i. 223-4. 

* The inhuman treatment of ‘barbarians' by Modem Western masters of the art of 
oceanic navigation is censured in a passage written by an English hand in the first 
generation of the Late Modem Age of Western history: 

‘The greatest invention that I know of in later ages has been that of the loadstone 
.. . The vast continents of China, the East and West Indies, the long extent and coasts 
of Africa, with the numberless islands belonging to them, have been hereby introduced 
into our acquaintance and our maps, and great increases of wealth and luxury, but none 
of knowledge, brought among us, further than the extent and situation of the country, 
the customs and manners of so many original nations which we call barbarous, and I am 
sure have treated them as if we hardly esteemed them to be a part of Mankind’ (Temple, 
Sir William, in ‘An Essay upon the Ancient and Modem Learning’, first published in 
A.D. 1690 in the second volume of the author’s Miscellanea). 

3 A passionate desire to engrave in indelible letters the gulf which divided them from 
barbarian aggressors who seemed like veritable human ogres explains the East Romans’ 
choice of the word 'Ayafnj^i ('Children of Hagar') to be their standing term of abuse 
for the Normans. This spitefully chosen nickname accomplished two vindictive purposes 

it c m. vnx U 


578 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 

•racialists 1 who had so deftly dug it along an alinement that left the diggers 
comfortably ensconced, on the right side of the invidious dividing line, 
in a Nordicized Abraham’s bosom. 2 In the third place the racial stigma 
differed from the religious and cultural stigmata (though in this respect 
it resembled the politico-economic stigma) in singling out for its cri¬ 
terion of distinction between one hypothetical kind of human being 
and another the most superficial, trivial, and insignificant aspect of 
Human Nature that could have been selected for this inauspicious pur¬ 
pose. 

If the inhuman line between human sheep and human goats is to be 
drawn at all, the religious and cultural tests have at any rate the most to 
be said for them both, intellectually and morally; for the most important 
and significant manifestation of the spirit of a spiritual creature is 
assuredly his religion and, next to his religion, his secular culture, where¬ 
as the curve of his nose, the proportions of his skull, the strength of the 
pigmentation under his skin, the shape of a segment of his hair, or any 
other physical accident of his spiritual constitution and character that 
we may care to name, tells us nothing about anything that concerns a 
man’s relations with his fellow men, himself, and God. No doubt the 
racialist will retort hotly that this is a caricature of his point of view, 
inasmuch as it ignores his conviction that these physical characteristics 
are outward visible signs of an inward spiritual grace in himself and 

at one stroke. It exposed the hollowness of the Normans’ profession of Christianity 
by assimilating them to the Muslim 'unbelievers’; and it branded their shame upon 
them ineffaccably by proclaiming it to be an inborn quality of their race. 

1 ‘Can the Ethiopian change his skin, or the leopard his spots?’ (Jer. xiii. 23) was the 
text on which the Late Modem Western racialists founded their doctrine (see II. i. 209); 
but, in the writer's day, this reed-staff threatened to pierce the hand that leant upon it 
(2 Kings xviii. 21), by turning out to be an open question and not the rhetorical question 
that it had been assumed to be by the militant doctrinaires who had put their trust in it. 
The social history of the United States had shown that neither legislation nor the public 
feeling of a dominant majority could prevent individual human beings of diverse race 
from mating—even when the physical diversity was conspicuous—in a population in 
which these diverse races were geographically intermingled. The result in the United 
States had been a blending of races in which the gulf between the local representatives 
of a ‘pure’ Negro race and a ‘pure’ White race had been bridged by intermediate shades 
of every degree of colour from ‘near-Negro’ to ‘near-White’; and it was notorious that 
appreciable numbers of ‘near-Whites’ were perpetually ‘passing’, without detection, out 
of the ‘under-privileged’ into the unpenalized caste of North American Society. Mean¬ 
while, those citizens of the United States whose tincture of pigmentation was still too 
strong to allow them to ‘pass’ were at any rate able to assimilate themselves physically 
to their White fellow citizens to some extent by artificially uncurling their hair (see II. 1. 
228); and, at the moment of writing, it was being rumoured that some enterprising man 
of science had discovered a trick for bleaching Negro skins by reducing the strength of 
their pigmentation to the quantity present in skins popularly described as ‘White’. 

This application of Science to the socinl purpose of producing a physical meta¬ 
morphosis, which was a auestion of such lively interest for Negro citizens of the United 
States, mattered less to Negro citizens of France, who did not feel the same urge to 
‘pass’ physically because it was open to them, as we have seen, to arrive socially by a cul¬ 
tural avenue along which they would not find their progress impeded by any racial 
barrier. The openness of this French road is illustrated in the story of an impromptu 
repartee which Dumas pirt is reported to have made to an unsuccessful contemporary 
French man of letters who had rashly given vent to his envy of the dusky star by saying 

Diimti in tkr r>r«-ti nf iiiitmi,., ■ ‘On <•<<• m—<i.ur 


singe; ma famille a commence 0C1 la vfitre a termini!’ It is perhaps questionable whether 
this French colloquy is authentic or legendary, but it is certain that Booker Washington 
could not have ventured, even on the north side of the Mason and Dixon line, to make 
the equivalent repartee to a White fellow traveller in an American pullman car. 
a Luke xvi. 22-26. 



DEHUMANIZATION 579 

absence of this grace in other breeds which on this account he stigmatizes 
as inferior. It is indeed a fundamental and indispensable doctrine of the 
false religion of Racialism that the racial characteristics discernible in 
our human bodily physique are supposed to be correlated—and this 
permanently and precisely—with hypothetical racial characteristics of 
a psychic order;' but this dogma was a bare postulate which had never 
been borne out by any scientific demonstration down to the time 
of writing; and the burden of proof had still to be discharged by 
the credulous before the task of disproof need be shouldered by the 
sceptics. 

If the conventional classification of physical races by differences in 
strengths of pigmentation were adopted, provisionally and without preju¬ 
dice, for the sake of the argument, it would be found, as we have 
ascertained in another context, 1 that, even within the relatively short 
Time-span of five or six thousand years during which the species of 
human society known as civilizations had been in existence up to date, 
contributions to civilizations had been made by people of all colours 
except the Black. Within the period of less than half that length which 
had seen tire epiphany of the higher religions, contributions to the 
spiritual life of these best-inspired activities of the spirit of Man had 
also been made by people of all colours except the Black and the Red; 3 
and a twentieth-century racialist who sought to justify his superstition 
by drawing attention to the comparative spiritual sterility of the Red 
and Black races so far could be confronted by a contemporary geo- 

E pher-sociologist with evidence that the same sterility had been 
played, within the same brief periods, by certain representatives of 
the allegedly superior Brown, Yellow, and White races whose other 
representatives had been demonstrating their spiritual prowess. 

In the Westernizing World of the twentieth century of the Christian 
Era there were still Brown, Yellow, and White, as well as Red and 
Black, ‘Natives’ and ‘Barbarians’. In this place wc need not reproduce 
our previous inventory of them. 4 Wc need only remark that the then 
fast-dwindling pockets of Raw Whites in the Rif, the Atlas, Albania, the 
Caucasus, Kurdistan, and North-Eastern Iran, who had not yet emulated 
their former peers, the ci-devant ‘Wild Highlanders’ and ‘Wild Irish’ in 
a Celtic Fringe of the British Isles, by catching a cultural infection from 
their neighbours, were a less disconcerting spectacle for the representa¬ 
tives of Civilization in this age than the recently formed patches of Mean 
Whites in the United States, 5 the Union of South Africa, and other 
countries overseas which had been added to the domain of the Western 
Civilization in its Late Modern Age by English-speaking colonists from 
Western Europe. These Mean Whites were an alarming phenomenon, 
because, unlike the Raw Whites, they were not laggard barbarians but 

1 The unprovenness of this doctrine has been exposed in II. i. 208-9. 

1 Sec the tables in II. i. 232 and 239. 

» In II. i. y 2 - 3 , nn.6 and 7, it has been pointed out that the so-called 'Red Race’ 
and 'Yellow Race' were misnomers for arbitrarily dissociated fractions of a single- 
Mongolo-American Race distinguished, not by the colour of the skin, but by the texture 
of the hair and the set of the eyes. 

« In II. i. 236. * See II. i. 466-7 »nd II. ii. 309-13. 



580 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
were the lapsed successors of predecessors who had been bearers of the 
Western culture of their day. Yet the lapsed Whites of Appalachia were 
not so terrifying a portent as the apostate Whites who had risen up in 
the writer’s generation within the European homeland of the Western 
Civilization to preach and practise those perverse Neo-Pagan religions 
Fascism and National Socialism in which a Western White Man had 
deliberately repudiated a Western Christian spiritual heritage by revert¬ 
ing, like the Communist heirs of an Orthodox Christian spiritual heri¬ 
tage, to an idolatrous worship of Collective Humanity. 1 


2. Zealotism and Herodianism 
A Pair of Polar Standpoints 

In the preceding chapter we have found that, in an encounter between 
contemporaries in which an impact of an aggressively radioactive culture 
on an alien body social has resulted in the penetration of the assaulted 
party’s defences by the attacking forces, the inhumanity which is the 
dominant party's characteristic response to the spiritual ordeal of finding 
alien souls at his mercy is a single-track descensus Avemi in which the 
only perceptible diversification of an essentially uniform reaction’s 
character is produced by the passage to some lower step in the one-way 
traffic down this sinister stairway. When we turn to examine the re¬ 
sponse of the party at bay against an inhuman enemy within its battered 
gates, we are confronted with an apparent contrast; for the victim of a 
successful assault seems to have a choice between two alternative pos¬ 
sible reactions which look at first sight as if they were not merely diverse 
but antithetical. 

For minds educated in a Christian tradition, the most familiar histori¬ 
cal embodiments of these two psychological poles are the opposite atti¬ 
tudes towards Hellenism, and contrary' policies for coping with it, of 
two Jewish parties in the Palestinian province of the Syriac World in the 
time of Christ that appear in the New Testament under the names 
‘Zealots’ and ‘Herodians’. This example has the triple advantage of 
being not only familiar but momentous, because the historic collision 
between Hellenism and Jewry released the dynamic spirit of Chris¬ 
tianity, and not only momentous but illuminating, because these two 
Jewish antithetical reactions to a pressure exerted by Hellenism were so 
sharply pronounced that they can be used as indicators for detecting and 
sorting out other instances of the same psychological phenomena in 
other passages of the histories of encounters between contemporaries. 

In that age, Hellenism was pressing hard upon Jewry on every plane 
of social activity—not only in economics and in politics, but also in art, 
ethics, and philosophy. No Jew could escape or ignore, turn where he 
would, the question of becoming or not becoming a Hellene. It was a 
question by which every Jew in that age was inevitably obsessed. The 
only choice open to him was an apparent choice between alternative 
ways of meeting this single insistent challenge; and this was the issue 
over which the ‘Zealots’ and the ‘Herodians’ parted company to strike 

1 See V. v. 334-7. 



ZEALOTISM AND HE ROD IAN ISM 581 

out separate paths for themselves in what might appear to be diametri¬ 
cally opposite directions. 

The Zealot faction was recruited from people whose impulse, in face 
of attacks delivered by a stronger and more energetic aggressive alien 
civilization, was to take the manifestly negative line of trying to fend 
off the formidable aggressor. The harder Hellenism pressed them, the 
harder they strove, on their side, to keep themselves clear of Hellenism 
and all its works, ways, feelings, and ideas; and their method of avoiding 
contamination was to retreat into the spiritual fastness of their own 
Jewish heritage, lock themselves up within this psychic donjon , close 
their ranks, maintain an unbroken and unbending front, and find their 
inspiration, their ideal, and their acid test in the loyalty and sincerity of 
their observance of every jot and tittle of a traditional Jewish law. 

The faith by which the Zealots were animated was a conviction that, 
if they were thus meticulously conscientious in abiding by their ances¬ 
tral tradition and observing the whole of it and nothing else, without 
ever again yielding to the temptation to go a whoring after other gods, 1 
they would be rewarded by being given grace to draw from the jealously 
guarded source of their own spiritual life a supernatural strength that 
would enable them to repel the alien aggressors—no matter how over¬ 
whelming the aggressors’ superiority over the Zealots in material power 
might appear to be on a matter-of-fact view. 2 The Zealot’s posture was 
that of a tortoise who has withdrawn his head and feet into his shell, or 
of a hedgehog who has tucked away his tender snout and pads inside the 
prickly ball, with its chevaux-de-frise of spines all pointing outwards, 
into which the shy animal has curled himself up as his retort to the ap¬ 
proach of a dangerous enemy. 3 (The Zealot’s sardonically observant 

1 Judges ii. 17. Cp. Exod. xxxiv. x5—16; Lev. xvii. 7; Deut. xxxi, 16. 

* This fundamental article of the Zealot’s faith has been given a classical expression 
in 2 Macc. viii. 36, in the confession here put into the mouth of the Seleucid King 
Antiochus IV's general Nicin&r after the disastrous repulse of his expedition against 
Jerusalem circa 165 B.c. 'He was fain to confess, now, that the Jews had God Himself 
for their protector, and, would they but keep His law’s, there was no conquering them!’ 
{The Old Testament neuly translated from the Latin Vulgate bv Mgr. Ronald A. Knox, 
vol. ii (London 1949, Bums, Oates, & Washboume), p. >518). The original Greek runs: 
Karr/yyekXtv vjtippayov [rov 0 e 6 v] jfxe iv to or ‘lovoalous 1 8itx rov rponov r oQrov 
arpiurovi ebai rovs ‘JovSaCovs Sia »o &*o\ov 9 fiv roij Cm' aurop nportray pivots topois. 

> This characterization of Zcalotism as a negatively defensive reaction to an appre¬ 
hension of danger is borne out by celebrated episodes in the domestic histories of the 
Hellenic and the Western Civilization. 

The conflict between traditional Hellenic religion—or superstition—^and the rational¬ 
ist intellectual enlightenment of the fifth century B.C. produced explosions of Zealotism 
in Athenian souls subjected to unwontedly severe psychological stresses and strains by 
the great Atheno-Peloponnesian War of 431-404 B.c. and by the great plague which 
in 430-429 B.c. and again in 427 B.c., ravaged a city overcrowded by refugees from an 
invaded country-side. This Athenian wave of Zealot feeling manifested itself in a series 
of prosecutions of prominent 'intellectuals' on charges of offences against Attic religious 
orthodoxy (sec VII. vii. 472). The scries began with the prosecutions of the resident 
aliens Anaxagoras of Clazomenae (? in absentid and not nominatim) and Aspasia of 
Miletus (perhaps both as moves in the temporarily successful political campaign against 
Pericles, which led to his fall in 430 b.c.), and it was continued in the throng of prosecu¬ 
tions in and after 415 B.c., when, besides the judicial proceedings against the alien 
philosophers Protagoras of Abdera and Diagoras of Melos, the native Athenian aristo¬ 
crat-politician Alcibiades was prosecuted on the same charge of having profaned the 
Eleusinian Mysteries, and a regular witch-hunt was set on foot to find human scape¬ 
goats to atone for the mutilation of the Hermae. The climax and conclusion of the series 
was the prosecution of Socrates in 399 B.C. (Sec Secck, O.: Geschichte des Untergangs der 
Antiken Welt, vol. iii, 2nd ed., Stuttgart 1921, Metzler), pp. 47-48; Adcock, F. E., in 



582 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
Herodian rival would, no doubt, have been more inclined to describe 
his foolish brother’s attitude as that of an ostrich who has buried her 
head in the sand). The Zealot’s watchwords were Debout les mortsV and 
‘Upon this rock I will build My Church and the gates of Hell shall not 
prevail against It’. 2 

The anti-Zealot Herodian faction was recruited from the servants, 
supporters, and admirers of an opportunist statesman whose Idumaean 
provenance worked together with his personal genius to enable this son 
of a recently incorporated ci-devant Gentile province of a Seleucid 
Hellenic Monarchy’s Maccabacan Jewish successor-state to take a 
fresher and less prejudiced view of Jewry’s Hellenic problem than was 
open to contemporary Judaean Jews, whose line of vision had been 
so heavily depressed by the crushing incubus of a long accumulated 
cultural heritage that their horizon was confined within the patch of 
ancestral ground to which their feet were rooted. 3 Herod the Great’s 

The Cambridge Ancient History, vol. v (Cambridge 1927, University Press), pp. 477-8; 
Nilsson, M. P.: Greek Popular Religion (New York 1940, Columbia University Press), 
p. 122). 

In the legal proceedings involving Anaxagoras and Aspasia and in the trial of Socrates, 
popular feeling was no aoubt exploited for political purposes. This motive in the pro¬ 
secution of Socrates has been noticed already in the present Study in VII. vii. 472; 
and, in recording Diopcithcs’ motion for the prosecution of 'disbelievers in the super¬ 
natural and teachers of theories about the heavenly bodies’, Plutarch, in his Pender, 
chap. 32, states that Diopeithes was 'gunning for’ {irrepeiiopevos tlf) Pericles by ex¬ 
ploiting the feeling against [Pericles’ mend and prot<g<] Anaxagoras. But cherchez la 
politique is not an adequate explanation of the outburst in 415 B.c. 'On this occasion a real 
religious hysteria broke out, for these events took place just before the great fleet sailed 
for Syracuse’ (Nilsson, op. dt., loc. dt.). 

These manifestations of Zealotism at Athens during the Atheno-Peloponnesian War 
on the eve of the expedition against Syracuse had their counterparts at Rome during the 
Hannibalic War on the morrow of the Roman disaster at Cannae. When, at this juncture, 
two Vestal Virgins were found guilty of having broken the tabu against their indulging 
in sexual intercourse, one of them was punished by being buried alive, while the other 

a escaped this fate by an anticipatory suicide. One of the seducers, who was a ponti- 
clerk (seriba pontificit), was beaten to death by the Pontifex Maximus in person. 
But these savage punishments of members of the Roman ofiidal religious establishment 
who had been convicted of a ritual offence are not so horrifying as the propitiation of an 
angry Roman Pantheon by the gruesome rite of burying alive in the Forum Boarium 
four innocent aliens: a male and female Greek and a male and female Gaul (sec Fowler, 
W. Warde: The Religious Experience of the Roman People (London 1911, Macmillan), 
pp. 319-20). 

In the Early Modem Age of Western history an Athenian Zealot reaction against a 
rationalist enlightenment that had culminated in the judicial murder of Socrates had 
its counterpart in a.d. 1600 in the judicial murder of Giordano Bruno by a death which 
was as cruel as the deaths inflicted on their victims by Etruscan-minded pagan Roman 
ecclesiastical authorities in the panic following the catastrophe at Cannae. 

' The heroically absurd word of command by which, according to a legend of the 
World War of a.d. 1914-18, a French subaltern, turned Tcrtulfian-minded by the 
exaltation of despair, had conjured up into action again the no longer living effectives 
required for repelling an irresistible German assault on a trench which the Frenchman 
had been ordered to hold at all costs. 

* Matt. xvi. 18. 

J It is no accident that the Idumaean Jewish statesman who offered to the Jews of his 
day a mundane solution of their Hellenic problem should have shared with the Galilaean 
Jewish Saviour who offered to them the insight to sublimate the same problem on to the 
spiritual plane the one common characteristic of being the offspring of new ground 
beyond the limits of a hard-baked Judaea. The cultural background of ‘Galilee of the 
Gentiles’ has been indicated in II. ii. 73-74 and in V. vi. 477-8 and 499. The policy 
of Herod the Great has been touched upon in V. vi. 123. This ex-Gentile statesman who 
forcibly kept a post-Alexnndrine Palestinian Jewry out of trouble during his lifetime 
by compelling them to allow him to manage their affairs is 'the opposite number’ of an 
ex-Jewish statesman who rehabilitated a nineteenth-century British Conservative Party 
by inducing them to place the management of their affairs in his hands. If Herod showed 



ZEALOTISM AND HERODIANISM 583 

prescription for Jewry’s problem of coping with Hellenism was, first, to 
take the objective measure of this alien social force’s irresistibly superior 
power with a sober eye, and then to learn and borrow from Hellenism 
every Hellenic accomplishment that it might prove necessary for the 
Jews to acquire for the judicious and practicable purpose of equipping 
themselves for holding their own, and even contriving to lead a more or 
less comfortable life, in the Hellenizing World that was their inescap¬ 
able new social environment. 

In a Zealot’s eyes this Herodianism was a compromise that was as 
dangerous as it was impious and cowardly; but the Herodians could 
argue plausibly on behalf of their policy that it was preferable to the 
Zealots’ impulse in every respect that was of any practical consequence. 
It was positive instead of being negative, and was therefore free to be 
active instead of condemning itself to be passive, whereas the Zealot line 
was hopelessly passive in spirit, however violently it might simulate 
activity in its foolhardy physical exercises. More than that, the Hero¬ 
dians could represent that, in following their own line, they were ex¬ 
hibiting a greater moral courage than any to which the Zealots could lay 
claim, since the attitude which the Zealots denounced as an Herodian 
opportunism was in truth simply the realism of minds strong enough to 
look facts in the face without flinching, to take these indisputable facts 
as they were, and to frame a straightforward policy on this firm basis. 

Hellenism, the Herodians would say, was a hard fact which had suc¬ 
cessfully intruded itself into Jewry’s social universe, and from which 
there was no possibility of escape. The Zealots’ attitude of uncompro¬ 
mising non-recognition of the presence and power of this triumphant 
alien force was an attitude of moral cowardice entailing an impolicy of 
impossibilism that courted certain defeat. The one effective way for 
Jewry to cope with Hellenism was for the Jews to take to heart the mani¬ 
fest limitations of their own power; to recognize that their social universe 
could never be the same again since the emergence of Hellenism above 
the Syriac World’s horizon; and to grasp, and act upon, the truth that 
Hellenism could be fought successfully only by the adoption of Hellenic 
weapons. According to the Herodian exposition of the case, the real 
choice lay between a voluntary Hellcnization of Jewish life to whatever 
extent might be found necessary in the course of an empirical solution 
of the Hellenic problem ambulando, and an irresponsible Zealot impulse 
to ride for a fall in which Judaism would succumb to Hellenism alto¬ 
gether—with nothing to show for such a stupidly purposeless sacrifice 
beyond the poor consolation of having managed to make the mock- 
heroic Zealot gesture of shaking an infantile fist in an unimpressed 
Destiny’s face. The Herodian’s watchwords were Fas est et ab hoste 
doceri 1 and ‘when you are in Rome, do as Rome does’. And, if a Zealot 
had been shocked by the Herodian’s impiety into putting to him the 
searching question, 'Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit 

himself less adroit than Disraeli in proving unable to carry out his policy without resort¬ 
ing to the crude expedient of repression, this was because, of these two audacious 
political acrobats, the ex-Gentile had committed himself to performing the greater lour 
deforce. 

* Ovid: Metamorphoies, Book IV, 1. 428. 



584 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
unto his stature?', 1 the Herodian would have replied without hesitation 
that he, for one, could answer that question in the affirmative—an 
answer indicating that, in spite of his air of rationalism, the Herodian, 
like the Zealot, was actuated by a faith which, in its Herodian vein, was 
perilously akin to hybris. 

A Survey of Zealot and Herodian Reactions 2 

We cannot listen to the Herodian’s and the Zealot’s competitive ex¬ 
positions of their cases without being moved to ask ourselves two ques¬ 
tions. How do these melodramatically contradictory attitudes stand to 
one another in fact? And does either of them prove to be an effective 
retort to the successful penetration of an assaulted body social by the 
cultural radiation of an aggressive alien society which is the common 
challenge evoking both these ostensibly opposite responses? It would be 
premature, however, to take up cither of these questions before making 
a wider survey of the field of our present inquiry; for the two psycho¬ 
logical reactions which we have just identified in the attitudes, and 
labelled with the names, of two factions which disputed between them 
the protagonist’s role on the stage of Palestinian Jewish politics during 
the hundred years ending in a.d. 70 can, of course, be detected in many 
other passages of history; and these other manifestations of them may 
be expected to throw further light on their respective characters and on 
their mutual relations. 

In the history of the Jews’ encounter with Hellenism—to look no 
farther afield than this episode, for the moment—the phenomenon of 
Herodianism is already discernible by a date that anticipates Herod the 
Great’s seizure of power in the Hasmonaean Jewish principality in 
Palestine by at least a century and a half. Even if we reject as unhistorical 
the legendary account of the Septuagint’s translation of the Jewish scrip¬ 
tures from the Hebrew and Aramaic into the Greek by a Ptolemaic royal 
command in the reign of Philadclphus (regnabat 283-245 b.c.), 3 we can 
trace the beginnings of a voluntary sclf-rfcllenization of the immigrant 
Jewish community in Alexandria right back to the infancy of this melt¬ 
ing-pot city on the morrow of its founder’s death; and even in the com¬ 
paratively secluded hill-country of Judaea the High Priest Joshua-Jason, 
who is the archetype of the Herodian school of statesmanship, was busy 
as early as the fourth decade of the second century b.c. on his devil's 
work (as it appeared in Zealot eyes) of seducing his younger colleagues 
in the Jewish hierarchy into an indecently naked exposure of their bodies 
in an Hellenic palaestra and a shockingly vulgar screening of their heads 
under the broad brim of an Hellenic petasus* The damnatio memoriae 
through which Jason’s Herodian escapade has been immortalized in the 

1 Matt. vi. 27. 

? Much of the evidence cited in the following survey has already been presented in 
this Study in other contexts, especially in Part IX B, in the present volume, and in V. v. 
58-712 and V.vi. t-132, as well as in V. vi. 213-42. In the present chapter, references are 
given to the revelant passages in Part V but not to those in Part IX B. 

» According to Edwyn Bcvan, in A History of Egypt under the Ptolemaic Dynasty 
(London 1927, Methuen), p. : 12, the translation of the Old Testament was made, bit 
by bu, in Egypt during the last three centuries before the Christian Era’. 

4 Sec V - vi - *° 3 - 5 . with the passage quoted from 2 Macc. iv. 7-17 on p. 104, n. 1. 



ZEALOTISM AND HEROD I AN ISM 585 

Second Book of Maccabees is a revealing exhibition of the animus that 
Herodian policies arouse in Zealot hearts; and this provocation in high 
places at Jerusalem duly evoked a 'Zealot' reaction at least five genera¬ 
tions before these anti-Hellenic Jewish fanatics had eventually acquired 
their historic soubriquet from a zeal for the Lord 1 * 3 which had long since 
eaten them up.* 

Nor was Jewish Zealotism crushed out of existence by the military 
and political catastrophe of a.d. 70, nor even by its conclusive repetition 
in A.n. 135 ; s for the gentle vein of Jewish Zealotism, consecrated in the 
legends of the old scribe Eleazar and of the Seven Brethren and their 
Mother, 4 which had declared itself before the alternative violent vein 
had found vent in the militancy of the Maccabees, came into its own at 
last when Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai responded to the tremendous 
challenge of the fall of Jerusalem under the assaults of Titus’s storming 
columns by endowing Jewry with an inertly rigid institutional frame¬ 
work and a passively obstinate psychological habitus that enabled it to 
preserve its distinctive communal life in the frail clay tenement of a 
politically impotent diaspora. 5 

Jewry, however, was not the only Syriac community, nor the Syriac 
Society the only Oriental Civilization, to be divided against itself into 
an Herodian and a Zealot camp by the challenge of having to react to the 
impact of a post-Alexandrine Hellenism in one way or other. The 
Maccabaean-tempered Zealot insurrections of non-Jewish Syrian 
plantation-slaves in Sicily in the latter decades of the second century 
b.c. 6 were balanced at Rome, in the ensuing Imperial Age, by the 
Herodian flow of a stream of Syriac freedmen-converts to Hellenism 
which was satirized by a contemporary spokesman of an Hellenic domi¬ 
nant minority, in a celebrated phrase, as a noisome and unnatural dis¬ 
charge of the Orontes into the Tiber. 7 Conversely, the Herodianism of 
a more well-to-do and more sophisticated stratum of the Syriac Society, 
which an Hellenic dominant minority was prepared to take into social 
partnership with itself on terms of virtual equality, was balanced by the 
conscription of other Syriac higher religions, besides Judaism, for the 
spiritually irrelevant and desecrating Zealot fatigue duty of serving as 
instruments for the waging of a secular cultural warfare. Zoroastrianism, 8 
Nestorianism and Monophysitism, 9 and Islam 10 all, in turn, followed 
Judaism’s lead in making this spiritually disastrous deviation from 
Religion’s true path. Yet the last three of these perverted religious 
movements all eventually made some subsequent atonement for their 
Zealot aberration by the Herodian act of translating into their Syriac 
and Arabic liturgical languages the classical works of Hellenic philo¬ 
sophy and science; and the Oriental manuscripts which survived in 
twentieth-century Western libraries to bear witness to the Herodian 


1 2 Kings x. 16. 

J Psalm lxix. 9, quoted in John ii. 17. Cp. Psalm cxix. 139. 

3 See V. v. 68. * a Macc. vi. 18-vii. 42, cited in V. v. 72. 

s See V. v. 75-76. 6 Sec V. v. 69-72 and V. vi. 238-9. 

1 Juvenal: Satires, No. Ill, 11 . 60-80, quoted in V. v. 67. 

8 Sec V. v. 12S-6 and 659-61. 

» See V. v. 127-8. 

B 2888 . vm 


10 See V. v. 673-9* 
U 2 



586 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
life-work of these assiduous translators would count for more in a judi¬ 
cious historian’s estimation than the legend that the Caliph ‘Umar had 
given orders for the burning of the books in the library at Alexandria.' 

In this pharos from which, by ‘Umar’s day, an Hellenic intellectual 
light had been streaming out into an encompassing Oriental darkness for 
a thousand years, the way had been prepared for the Syriac intellectual 
Herodians of the ‘Abbasid Age by a Jewish Philo 2 and a Christian 
Clement and Origen. 3 And even a stubborn Iranian rear-guard of the 
Syriac World’s anti-Hellenic battle-order, which was not called upon to 
face the fire of Hellenism at the murderously point-blank range at which 
this artillery was discharged against a devoted Jewish vanguard, had to 
suffer first the annoyance of seeing a militantly Zealot anti-Hellenic 
Zoroastrian Church’s domestic competitor, Mithraism, take an Herodian 
path into a mission field in partibus Hellenids, where Zoroastrianism had 
made itself too odious to gain an entry, and then the humiliation of see¬ 
ing the Zoroastrian True Faith itself sacrilegiously ‘processed’ for export 
to the Hellenic World by the ingeniously Herodian-mindcd heresiarch 
Mani. 4 

When we turn to consider the reactions to Hellenism in the other 
Oriental societies that had shared the Syriac World’s experience of being 
subdued by Hellenic arms in and after the generation of Alexander the 
Great, we find the outburst of Jewish Zealotism in Judaea in the fourth 
decade of the second century b.c. being anticipated in the last decade of 
the third century b.c. by a Zealot emeute in Egypt, s while the swift 
failure of Joshua-Jason’s audacious Herodian attempt to Hellenize the 

K :hood of the Temple of Yahweh at Jerusalem was balanced in the 
tiac World by the eventual success of a gradual movement towards 
converting the metropoleis of the Egyptian nomes into simulacra of 
Hellenic municipalities which began with the enrolment of young native 
Egyptian notables as Hellenic gymnasiasts. 6 In a post-Alcxandrine 
Babylonia a dwindling band of astronomer-priests, who were fighting a 
losing battle to preserve a more and more esoteric native cultural heri¬ 
tage against an invading Syriac culture’s progressive encroachments, 
were so zealously bent on eluding the contaminating touch of the Syriac 
aggressor who was delivering this frontal attack that they inadvertently 
leaned over backwards into an Herodian Philhellenism; 7 and it was no 
accident that in a later act of this play with three dramatis personae a 
fossilized remnant of the Babylonic Society which had managed to keep 
its head above the encompassing Syriac flood-waters on an unsubmerged 
Mesopotamian islet at Harran should have taken a hand in the intel¬ 
lectual conversion of the Syriac Society to Hellenism in the ‘Abbasid 
Age. 8 In an Indie World which had been forced into an intimate contact 
with Hellenism by the Bactrian Greek war-lord Demetrius’s invasion of 


« See V. vi. iri-12. 

J See V. v. 366-7 end 539. 


See V. v. 539 - 40 . 


4 An "Ppreciation of the respective relations in which Mithraism and Manichaeism 
atood to Hellenism has been offered in V. v. 575-8. » Sec V. v. 68. 

* See VI. vii. S o, and pp. 408 and 443 - 4 . above. 

7 See V. v. 94 and 123, n. 2. 

1 The work of the Harrfni Thabit b. QurrS has been noticed on p. 408, n. 5, above. 



ZEALOTISM AND HEROD IAN ISM 587 
the Mauryan Empire’s domain circa 183 b.c., we can likewise observe 
symptoms of our two familiar alternative psychological reactions in the 
Herodian Philhcllenism of a Mahayanian Buddhist religious art 1 and in 
the anti-Hellenic vein in a Zealot-minded Hinduism. 

This survey of the psychological reactions in the societies which en¬ 
countered an aggressive post-Alexandrine Hellenism would be incom¬ 
plete if we failed to notice one figure whose attitude cannot be accounted 
for adequately unless we are prepared sometimes to find the Herodian 
and the Zealot nature both incarnate in the same person. Mithradates 
VI Eupator, the Iranian-descended king of a successor-state of the 
Achacmcnian Empire on the Hittite soil of Pontic Cappadocia, 2 pre¬ 
sented an attractively Herodian countenance to the eyes of European 
as well as Asiatic Hellenes who welcomed him in 88 b.c. as their de¬ 
liverer from a barbarous Roman yoke; yet the same war-lord wore the 
opposite appearance of an anti-Hellenic Zealot to the Cyzicenes who 
closed their city’s gates against him in 74 B.c. and greeted the Roman 
general Lucullus as their saviour from the doom of falling under the 
alien yoke of an Oriental despot. The cultural ambivalence of this North- 
East Anatolian actor on a post-Alexandrine Hellenic stage is reminiscent 
of the enigma presented, in the pre-Alexandrine chapter of the same 
Hellenic story, by a Ducetius 3 who, after having made his name as the 
unsuccessfully gallant Zealot leader of his Sicel fellow barbarians in the 
last round of their losing battle against Hellenic imperialism, lived to 
return to Sicily from an exile in the heart of the Hellenic World on 
the Herodian errand of founding in his homeland a new commonwealth 
in which Greek colonists and Sicel natives were to fraternize with one 
another in virtue of the natives’ voluntary adoption of the intruders’ 
alien culture. 

If we pass on now to glance at the psychological reactions manifested 
in the societies that encountered a Medieval Western Christendom, we 
shall find the most thorough-going practitioners of Herodianism known 
to History up to date in those ci-devant pagan Scandinavian barbarian 
invaders who, as a result of one of the earliest and most signal of all 
Western cultural victories, became the Norman exponents and propa¬ 
gators of a Medieval Western Christian way of life. The Normans pro¬ 
ceeded to embrace not only the religion but the language and the poetry 
of the Romance-speaking Western Christian native population of the 
successor-state that they had carved for themselves out of a Gallic 
province of the Carolingian Empire. When the French-named Norman 
minstrel Taillefer lifted up his voice to inspire his fellow knights as they 
were riding into battle at Hastings, he did not recite to them the Vdl- 
iungasaga in Norse but chanted to them the Song of Roland in French ; 4 
and, before William the Norman Conqueror of England high-handedly 
promoted the growth of a nascent Western Christian Civilization by a 
military act of self-aggrandizement which brought a backward and 
isolated province of Western Christendom under the influence of 
the metropolitan culture of the West in the most progressive of its 

* See V. v. 58 and 540. 

> See V. vi. 235-6. 


* See V. v. 69. 

* See II. ii. aox. 



588 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
contemporary versions, other Norman military adventurers had embarked 
on the enterprise of enlarging the bounds of the Western Christian 
World in the opposite quarter through conquests at the expense of 
Orthodox Christendom and D5r-al-Islam in Apulia, Calabria, and Sicily. 

The readiness of the Scandinavians to divert their psychic energy 
from the creative task of building up a promisingly precocious civiliza¬ 
tion of their own to the Herodian pursuit of adopting some alien civiliza¬ 
tion over whose native representatives they had established their military 
ascendancy was displayed in the adhesion of Scandinavian converts to 
other cultures besides that of Western Christendom, and in the conver¬ 
sion, not only of a vanguard that had planted itself within]the domains of 
the civilizations to whose attractions it succumbed, but also of a rear¬ 
guard that received these alien culture-rays either in some barbarian 
no-man’s-land or in the Vikings’ Scandinavian home. The adoption of 
the Western Christian Civilization by the Scandinavian settlers in Nor¬ 
mandy and the Danelaw, the influence of Byzantine and Islamic art and 
institutions on the Norman conquerors of Sicily, and the tincture of Far 
Western Christian Celtic culture that was acquired by the Ostmen in 
Ireland, and by the Norse colonists in the Western Isles, Iceland, and 
Greenland, are not such remarkable exhibitions of Herodianism—re¬ 
markable though they arc—as the eventual conversion of the Scandina¬ 
vian communities in and beyond the Celtic Fringe and in Scandinavia 
itself to the Western Christian culture, or as the adoption of the Ortho¬ 
dox Christian culture by the Russian Scandinavian conquerors of Slav 
barbarians in the basins of the Dniepr and the Neva. 1 

In the encounters between the representatives of a nascent Scandina¬ 
vian Civilization and their culturally alien neighbours, this Herodian 
tide had no difficulty in sweeping off their feet the ‘die-hard’ Zealot 
champions of an indigenous Scandinavian culture, though this original 
creation of the Scandinavian genius had a value which was worth pre¬ 
serving and a charm which might have been expected to inspire a more 
enthusiastic defence, while the victorious alien cultures had no physical 
force of their own, beyond the right arms of their Scandinavian converts, 
to pit against the spiritually abashed but militarily undefeated Berserkers. 
When we turn to survey the psychological reactions evoked by the im¬ 
pact of Medieval Western Christendom on the Syriac World and on the 
main body and the Russian offshoot of Orthodox Christendom, we find 
the balance between Zealotism and Herodianism rather less uneven here. 

In the Syriac World a predominantly Zealot reaction against Medieval 
Western Christian aggression, which came to a head in an union sacrie of 
D3r-al-Islam against the lodgements made in Syria by the Crusaders, 2 
was set off to some extent by the Norman-minded Herodianism of the 
Cilician Armenian Monophysite Christian converts to a contemporary 
Western Christian way of life. In the main body of Orthodox Christen¬ 
dom a likewise predominantly Zealot reaction expressed itself, as we 
have seen, in an execration of the Normans as ‘Children of Hagar’ and 
in a refusal to accept ecclesiastical union with the Western Christian 

1 These conversions of divers Scandinavian communities to divers alien cultures have 
been noticed in II. ii. 348-55. * See V. v. 354, and pp. 353-6 above. 



ZEALOTISM AND HEROD IAN ISM 589 

Church at the price of acknowledging the Papacy’s supremacy over the 
Eastern Orthodox Churches, even though the manifest price of non- 
acceptance was the doom of falling under Ottoman Turkish Muslim 
rule; yet this demonically Zealot Orthodox Christian antipathy towards 
an aggressive sister Christian civilization was tempered, in a few East 
Roman hearts and minds, by an Herodian appreciation, not only of the 
expediency of an unpalatable ecclesiastical union, but of the nobility of 
the Western ideal of chivalry and the fertility of the audacious Western 
innovation of employing the currently spoken vulgar tongue as a vehicle 
for literature. 1 

In the victorious revolt of Orthodox Christian Zealotism against an 
ecclesiastical union under Papal supremacy in accordance with the terms 
agreed at the Council of Florence in a.d. 1439, the Orthodox Church in 
Russia took the lead among the sundry national churches within the 
Orthodox communion in the resistance to Western ecclesiastical aggres¬ 
sion, while the simultaneous Western political aggression against Russian 
Orthodox Christendom in the shape of sweeping Polish and Lithuanian 
conquests of derelict Russian territory, after the Mongols’ catastrophic 
impact on Russia in the thirteenth century of the Christian Era had re¬ 
duced her to military and political impotence, was countered in Muscovy 
by a political manifestation of Zealotism in the shape of an absolute 
authoritarian state in which an East Roman tradition and ideal of auto¬ 
cracy were re-embodied in new institutions that were original creations 
of the Russian political genius. Yet this Zealot seedling of Byzantine 
autocracy at Moscow, which had originally been called into existence as 
a windbreak against the icy blast of a Mongol Eurasian Nomad domina¬ 
tion before being used to defend an unsubjugated remnant of Russian 
Orthodox Christendom against the predatory eastern marchmcn of a 
Late Medieval Western Christian World, could not claim to be a more 
characteristic Russian response to the challenge of Western pressure in 
this age than the Herodian seedling of Medieval Western civic liberty 
which was bedded out contemporaneously at Novgorod. 2 

It is true that the Gleichschaltung of Novgorod’s Western-inspired 
institutions and outlook, through the forcible incorporation of this 
ci-devant sovereign city-state into the dominions of a Muscovite ‘Third 
Rome’ in the eighth decade of the fifteenth century of the Christian Era, 
gave the Zealot answer a definitive victory over the Herodian answer 
to an insistent Western question in all parts of Holy Russia that had 

« This contemporary Western example was the genial influence that encouraged the 
buried living waters of a rudimentary vernacular Greek literature to ooze up into the 
open through cracks in the ice-cap of a Byzantine classicism and to breed a native school 
of drama alia Franca in Crete in the course of the long-maintained Venetian political 
dominion over this Greek Orthodox Christian island (see pp. 392-4, above, and X. ix. 

The voluntary entry of a Russian Orthodox Christian Novgorod into the commercial 
and cultural comity of a Medieval Western city-state cosmos is a more conspicuous, 
though more ephemeral, example of the cultural metamorphosis that is likewise exem¬ 
plified in the history of the city-states founded on the coasts and adjoining waterways 
of Ireland by Ostmen who were kinsmen and contemporaries of Novgorod’s original 
Scandinavian founders. In this context we may remind ourselves of a pre-Alexandrinc 
Hellenic city-state cosmos’s success in winning the cultural allegiance of the colonial 
city-states founded by the Hellenes’ Libyphoenician and Etruscan commercial and 
political rivals in the Western Basin of the Mediterranean. 



590 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
succeeded in keeping themselves politically inviolate from the stain of 
subjection to an alien Western rule; yet, even after the fall of Novgorod, 
Herodianism maintained an ascendancy over Zealotism during the next 
three centuries in those Russian Orthodox Christian territories that had 
been incorporated into the Western Christian kingdoms of Poland and 
Lithuania. On the ecclesiastical plane this Herodian proclivity revealed 
itself in a widespread—though not unchallenged and never all-em¬ 
bracing—acceptance of union with the Roman Church, on the terms 
agreed in a.d. 1439, by the Polish and Lithuanian Crowns' ci-devant 
Orthodox Christian subjects; 1 on the secular cultural plane the same 
vein of Herodianism found expression in a spontaneous progressive self- 
Polonization of the Orthodox and Uniate White Russian and Ukrainian, 
as well as the Latin Catholic White Russian and Lithuanian, nobility 
and gentry in the dominions of a Polish-Lithuanian United Kingdom. 

Our pair of antithetical psychological reactions can also be detected in 
the histories of an Ottoman Orthodox Christendom’s and a Hindu 
World’s respective encounters with an aggressive Iranic Muslim 
Civilization. 

In the main body of Orthodox Christendom under the Pax Otto- 
manica, a majority of the ra'iyeh belonging to the Millet-i-Rum still 
clung to an ancestral religion whose ecclesiastical independence they had 
chosen to preserve at the price of submitting to an alien political regime; 
yet this Zealotism was partially offset, even on the religious plane, by the 
Herodianism of a minority who, from the fourteenth down to the seven¬ 
teenth century of the Christian Era, were lured into apostasy from 
Christianity to Islam by tempting social advantages and dazzling political 
prizes that were the rich rewards for conversion to the religion of an 
Ottoman 'ascendancy ’. A political ambition, that had sometimes prompted 
Orthodox Christian parents to welcome the conscription of their chil¬ 
dren into the Padishah’s Slave-Household, 2 became a far stronger incen¬ 
tive to Herodianism in the hearts of Orthodox Christian subjects of the 
Porte when, in the course of the seventeenth century, new exigencies 
created by the rising pressure of the Western Christian Powers upon the 
Ottoman Empire moved the Porte to create new-fangled high offices of 
state to be held by Orthodox Christian ra’iyeh without their being called 
upon either to renounce their ancestral faith or to forfeit their personal 
freedom. 3 Meanwhile, the rank-and-file of the Millct-i-Rum, who, short 
of becoming free Muslims or Ottoman public slaves, did not enter the 
Ottoman public service even as unconverted freemen, had long since 


1 This comparative success of the Uniate movement among the Orthodox Christian 
subjects of the Western Catholic Polish and Lithuanian Crowns, by contrast with its 
signal failure among the Orthodox Christian subjects of an Orthodox Christian East 
Roman Empire, was remarkable, considering that the Ukrainian and White Russian 
converts to Uniatism lacked the political incentive which, in Greek Orthodox Christen¬ 
dom, had moved a sagacious Michael Palaioldghos to action as early as A.D. 1261 and 
had become so obviously urgent there by a.d. 1439 that it could then be ignored there 
only by a Zealot’s wilfully blind eyes. In Greek Orthodox Christendom the choice was 
one between ecclesiastical union with Rome and subjection to an alien political yoke, 
whereas the converts to Uniatism among the Orthodox subjects of Poland and Lithuania 
could not imagine that they were purchasing their escape from a political calamity that 
had already long since overtaken them. 

* Sec III. iii. 37, n. 1. J See II. ii. 224-3. 



ZEALOTISM AND HEROD I AN ISM 591 

succumbed to Herodianism in much larger numbers in the more trivial, 
yet nevertheless significant, ways of learning to talk their Ottoman 
masters’ language 1 and to ape their dress. 

The story of the Hindus’ psychological reaction to the rule of an 
Iranic Muslim ‘ascendancy’ runs on much the same lines. While a vast 
majority of the Hindu ra'iyeh of the Timurid Mughal Muslim emperors 
of India and their Afghan and Turkish Muslim forerunners emulated 
the Orthodox Christian ra'iyeh of the ‘Osmanlis in zealously resisting 
the temptation presented by potent social and political inducements to 
apostatize, there were local mass-conversions to Islam—particularly 
among the socially depressed ci-devant pagan converts to Hinduism in 
Eastern Bengal—that would appear to have been on a greater scale, not 
only absolutely but also relatively to the total head of population in 
question in either case, than the corresponding local mass-conversions 
to Islam among the Albanian, the Epirot and Cretan Greek, and the 
Pomak Bulgar Orthodox Christians and among the Bosniak Bogomils. 
Moreover, the Brahmans showed the same alacrity as the Phanariots in 
entering a Muslim Power’s public service as unconverted freemen, and 
the same facility in adopting their Muslim masters’ language 2 and dress. 

The history of an Iranic Muslim Society’s impact on the Orthodox 
Christian and Hindu worlds also offers us two examples of psychological 
ambivalence. The new religions founded by Sheykh Bedr-ed-Dln 
Slmavly in a fifteenth-century Western Anatolia 3 and by Guru Nanak 
in a fifteenth-century Panjab 4 were ostensibly expressions of a radical 
Herodianism; for both prophets proclaimed the fraternity and equality, 
on their own new common spiritual ground, of all their converts, what¬ 
ever their divers religious antecedents; and the common ground on 
which, according to Nanak’s revelation, the traditional divisions between 
Hindus and Muslims and between members of different Hindu castes 
were no longer valid was an article of Nanak’s faith that was not of 
Hindu but of Islamic provenance. Like all converts to Islam, all con¬ 
verts to Sikhism became one another’s brethren and peers in virtue of 
their having all alike given their allegiance to one Lord whom they had 
been taught to worship as the sole True Living God; and this tenet was 
so fundamental that Sikhism might be described with no less truth than 
brevity as an Hcrodian response to the impact of an Islamic monotheism 
upon the Hindu consciousness. Yet these intellectually convincing 
grounds for classifying Sikhism and Bedreddinism as expressions of 
Herodianism would have seemed academically irrelevant to the Mughal 
Emperors Jahangir and Awrangzlb, and to the Ottoman Emperor 
Mehmcd I, when they were encountering their Sikh and BedreddinI 
ra'iyeh on the battlefield in armed rebellion against an Islamic ‘ascen¬ 
dancy’; and, if these Iranic Muslim potentates had been required to 
employ the psychological terminology of this Study, we may feel sure 
that they would have entered the names of Har Govind, Govind Singh, 
Bedr-ed-Dln, and MustafS Borkltije in the Zealot, not the Herodian, 
column of our present inventory. 

« Sec V. v. 514-22. 

1 See V. v. hi and 537. 


* See V. v. 514-22. 

* See V. v. 106 and 665-8. 



592 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 

When we come to the encounters with the Modern Western Civili¬ 
zation which had overtaken all the contemporaries of this potently 
expansive society, we see the offshoot of the Far Eastern Society in 
Japan reacting to the impact of the West with vigour along both the 
two alternative lines. 

The strength of the Herodian current in Japan was demonstrated 
more impressively by its persistence in adversity than by its exuberance 
before it fell on evil days. The eager curiosity that inspired a facile adop¬ 
tion of the Western weapons, dress, 1 and religion imported by Portu¬ 
guese traders and missionaries during the honeymoon period, when 
Japan was making her first acquaintance with the West in the latter 
decades of the sixteenth century of the Christian Era, was justified by 
the silent heroism of this dubious wisdom’s children 1 when, after the 
Tokugawa regime had ordered its subjects, under pain of death as the 
penalty for disobedience, to break off relations with the West and to re¬ 
nounce the imported Western religion,* a remnant of Japanese crypto- 
Christians remained secretly loyal to their proscribed alien faith for 
more than two hundred years—as became apparent when, after the 
Meiji Revolution in a.d. 1868, it became possible for them at last, in the 
ninth or tenth generation, to come out into the open again. 

This second outburst of Herodianism in Japan in the middle decades 
of the nineteenth century was also, as we have seen, partly the work of 
other heroes who had risked and lost their lives in a non-religious Hero¬ 
dian cause by secretly studying Modem Western Science in a Dutch 
medium without waiting for the fall of an intolerantly Zealot-minded 
Tokugawa Shogunate. In the rediscovered light of these long-hidden 
candles 4 the Meiji Revolution in its day looked like a deferred but defini¬ 
tive triumph of an Herodianism which had been the predominant vein 
in the original Japanese response to the challenge of the West; yet, in 
this second bout, as in the first, the experience of half a century was to 
put a Zealot face on the reality behind Herodian first appearances—with 
the implication, for an historian’s long-sighted eye, that the Tokugawa 
period, in which Zealotism had been in the ascendant, had, after all, been 
something more than an irrelevant interlude in a Japanese psychological 
drama in which Herodianism was the ‘secular’ trend (in the economists’ 
technical use of the word). 

The strength of the Zealot current in Japan had been indicated from 
the outset by the assiduity with which the Japanese had equipped them¬ 
selves for holding their own against the formidable Western strangers by 
the ostensibly Herodian feat of learning how to make, as well as use, 
new-fangled Western fire-arms; and it was significant that the Tokugawa 
Government, when it set itself to sever relations between Japan and the 
West, cannily refrained from following up its veto on Western commodi¬ 
ties and Western religion by renouncing the employment of Western 
weapons. This statesmanlike disregard for logic was justified by the 
sequel; for the Tokugawa eventually forfeited a political ascendancy 
founded on military force when their military impotence to prevent 

' f cc y.' vi - I , oz - 1 Matt. xi. xo; Luke vii. 35. 

J See V. v. 365. « Matt. v. 15; Mark iv. 21; Luke vail. :6 and xi. 33. 



ZEALOTISM AND HERODIANISM 593 

Commodore Perry’s squadron from entering Yedo Bay in a.d. 1853 
made it alarmingly manifest to the Japanese public that, in the course 
of 215 years of deliberate self-isolation, the Bakufu had allowed its 
stationary seventeenth-century Western armaments to be left so far 
behind by the never-ceasing and ever-accelerating progress of Western 
military technique that the regime had at last become altogether incom¬ 
petent to live up to its acknowledged raison d'itre of keeping the West 
at arm’s length from the sacrosanct Land of the Gods. Between a.d. 
1853 and a.d. 1868 this public zeal in Japan for an effective fulfilment of 
the Tokugawa’s neglected Zealot mission displayed itself not only in a 
growing insubordination towards the authority of this now discredited 
indigenous regime but in a rising wave of xenophobia, foaming over 
into physical assaults, against Western intruders whom, in the mean¬ 
while, the Bakufu had been constrained by Western political pressure 
to readmit within its precincts; and the revolution in which a thus 
patently irreclaimable Tokugawa regime was ruthlessly liquidated was 
the work of descendants of Kyushuan pupils of the Portuguese who had 
made up their minds to repeat their sixteenth-century ancestors’ achieve¬ 
ment of mastering Destiny by acquiring the superior military technique 
of the West in its most up-to-date form. 

While this Japanese revolution can be presented as a triumph for 
Herodianism in the accurate statements that its economic programme 
was a thorough-going adoption of the material technique of the con¬ 
temporary Western World and that its political programme was the 
entry of Japan into the contemporary Western comity of nations, the 
same revolution can be presented simultaneously as a triumph for 
Zealotism in the likewise accurate statements that the intention inspiring 
the technological revolution was to turn Japan into a Great Power of 
the contemporary Western standard, and that she was resigning herself 
to the necessity of entering the arena of Western power politics because 
she had come to realize that this was the only condition on which she 
could continue to hold her own against the West on the face of a planet 
that had now been magnetized by Western arts into a single indivisible 
field of force. The latent Zealotism of the strategy behind the Herodian¬ 
ism of Japan’s tactics during the three-quarters of a century ending in 
a.d. 1945 was indeed divulged as early as a.d. 1882 in the official organiza¬ 
tion of the State ShintS, in which a resuscitated pre-Buddhaic paganism 1 
was utilized as a vehicle for the deification of a living Japanese people, 
community, and state through the symbolism of an archaistic cult of an 
Imperial Dynasty that was reputed to be the divine offspring of the Sun 


» The origin* of this archaistic Neo-Shinto movement can be traced back to the 
seventeenth century of the Christian Era, and its antecedents to the fifteenth century 
(see V. vi. 90, with n. 4). It was always suspect to the Tokugawa on account of its 
potentialities for serving as the ideology for an alternative regime based on a revival 
of the latent prestige of the Imperial Dynasty (sec ibid., p. 9 «. n. 3). The Tokugawa 
regime had sought to parry this threat to its stability by patronizing rival religions and 
philosophical movements. It had favoured the Mahiylna and had encouraged an archa¬ 
istic revival, not of Shintd, but of Confucianism (sec ibid., pp. 90-91, and Murdoch, J.: 
A History of Japan, vol. iii (London 1026, Kcgan Paul), p. 97). In promoting the pro¬ 
pagation in Japan of a Ncoconfucian Movement that had originated in contemporary 
China, the Bakufu was employing Herodian tactics for attaining its Zealot strategic 
objective. 


594 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
Goddess and that offered its hereditary collective divinity for worship 
here and now in the epiphany of a god perpetually incarnate in the 
person of the reigning Emperor. 1 

It will be seen that, during the four hundred years ending in a.d. 1952, 
the Japanese psychological reaction to the ordeal of encountering the 
West had been ambivalent through and through. 

The ultimately Zealot motive underlying a superficially Herodian- 
looking policy that has here been ascribed to the Japanese in and after 
the Meiji Revolution of a.d. 1868 was ascribed to the contemporary 
Chinese, on the morrow of the consummation of the Kuomintang 
Revolution in China in the third decade of the twentieth century, by a 
learned and acute student of Far Eastern history who was inclined at 
that date to take current Japanese Herodianism at its face value, or at 
any rate to judge that the latter-day Japanese importers of Western cul¬ 
tural wares were deceiving themselves in so far as they seriously expected 
to succeed, by the sophisticated means of a nicely calculated and strictly 
regulated dole of cultural rations, in eluding our empirically established 
social ‘law’ that, when once a society’s defences have been penetrated by 
the radiation of an intrusive alien culture, ‘one thing leads to another’ 
inexorably until, willy nilly, the assaulted party has to resign himself to 
adopting the assailant’s way of life in toto. 

‘The first approach of the West was resisted in Japan, as in China; but, 
when Perry demonstrated that the West “amounted to something”, the 
effect approximated to a revelation, and was so accepted. ... It is China, 
on the contrary’, which has endeavoured to use the weapons of the West 
to preserve itself from the West.... The whole history of Chinese relations 
with the West implies an underlying instinctive playing for time, in the 
hope that the West would exhaust itself and China be able to assert once 
more the superiority of which the Chinese are morally convinced.’ 1 

Twenty years after the publication of the book from which these pas¬ 
sages arc quoted, at a moment when Japan was under Western military 
occupation and China was under the rule of an indigenous Communist 
regime, it was manifestly rash to make a more than tentative and provi¬ 
sional estimate of the ‘secular’ psychological trend in either of these two 
provinces of the Far Eastern World; but it was nevertheless possible to 
observe unmistakable symptoms of both Herodianism and Zealotism in 
this episode of Chinese history, and also to notice certain likenesses and 
differences between the Chinese and the corresponding Japanese episode 
in respect of both the interplay and the relative strengths of the two 
alternative reactions. 

The light-hearted adoption of current Western fashions by latc-six- 
teenth-century and early-seventcenth-century Japanese barons and their 
retainers had its counterpart in the frivolous curiosity in regard to astro¬ 
nomical instruments and other toys of Modern Western Science that the 
Jesuit guests at the Imperial Court in Peking had the wit to arouse in 
the minds of Ming and Manchu emperors and Confucian litterati; yet 

1 See V. v. 707, n. 2, and V. vi. 93. 

1 Lutimore, O.: Manchuria, Cradle of Conflict (New York 1932, Macmillan), pp. 



ZEALOTISM AND HE ROD I AN ISM 595 

in China, as in Japan, the interest in Western fire-arms was both more 
serious and more sinister; and in China, as in Japan, again, adversity, in 
the severe form of official persecution, demonstrated the sincerity of the 
Herodianism of converts who became martyrs to their alien Christian 
faith,' while the eventual obsolescence of the ban on the profession of 
Christianity brought to light the persistence of Herodianism on the 
religious plane in China likewise when a fresh harvest of converts was 
reaped there by nineteenth-century successors of the proscribed Early 
Modern Western Christian missionaries. 

This second wave of Herodianism was transmitted, in China too, from 
the religious plane, on which it first made its reappearance, to the secular 
planes of education and business. Mission-educated Chinese converts to 
Protestantism completed their studies in the universities of the United 
States, and penurious Chinese emigrants established themselves in force 
as efficient and prosperous Westernizing business men in a number of 
South-East Asian countries—the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaya, Indo- 
China, and Burma—that had fallen under Western rule and had inconse¬ 
quence been incorporated into a Westernizing World on the economic 
plane as well as the political. 2 This Chinese commercial diaspora, as well 
as the Chinese alumni of Western educational campuses on both Chinese 
and Western ground, had played a part, out of proportion to their num¬ 
bers, in an Herodian political movement—Sun Yat-sen’s Kuomintang— 
which had attempted in the second quarter of the twentieth century of 
the Christian Era to emulate the achievement of the Japanese authors of 
a Meiji Revolution who had succeeded in obtaining admittance for their 
country into the contemporary comity of Western states on a footing of 
equality with the original members of the club. 

On the other hand, a Zealotism that had gained the upper hand in 
Japan eventually—in the fourth decade of the seventeenth century'—had 
declared itself in China promptly at the beginning of the history of 
Chinese intercourse with the West. Ming emperors who had welcomed 
Western apostles of Christianity to their imperial capital had anticipated 
the Tokugawa Government’s tardy precaution of confining the Dutch 
remnant of a Western commercial community in Japan to the islet of 
Deshima; for the Chinese imperial authorities had never permitted 
Western traders of any nation to reside on Chinese soil outside the con¬ 
fines of the Portuguese settlement at Macao and the mudbank of Sha- 
meen in the West River off the water-front at Canton, which was made 
to serve the purpose of a convict hulk for the internment of Western 
traders of all nations during their strictly limited and regulated seasonal 
visits. Even after the jealously locked, barred, and bolted gates of a 
Chinese Earthly Paradise had been blown in by British naval broadsides 
in the Sino-British ‘Opium War’ of a.d. 1839-42, a humiliatingly de¬ 
feated Chinese Government still managed, in the ensuing peace settle¬ 
ment, to prevent the now inevitable enlargement of the resident Western 

» The Battle of the Rites and its tragic outcome have been noticed in V. v. 366-7 and 
539 . 

2 The Chinese diasporih in Siam should be added to this list, notwithstanding Siam’s 
success in preserving her political independence down to the time of writing. 



596 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
traders’ ‘pale’ from being extended beyond half a dozen specified ‘treaty 
ports’. Missionaries of the Christian religion were the only Westerners 
who were then granted the privilege of travelling and residing at will 
throughout the length and breadth of Chinese territory; and the pro¬ 
gressive increase in the number of Western treaty ports and in the weight 
of Western influence in China in the course of the last six decades of the 
nineteenth century provoked a cumulative resentment in Chinese hearts 
which culminated in demonic eruptions of militant xenophobia. 

The Boxer Rising of a.d. 1900, like the sporadic outbreaks of Zealot- 
ism in Japan during the years a.d. 1853-68, was directed in the first 
place against a decadent indigenous regime whose dubious title to legiti¬ 
macy was now challenged on the score of its manifest incompetence to 
resist the encroachments of Western intruders who were the rebels’ ulti¬ 
mate target. An incurable inability to carry out the Zealots’ anti-Western 
requirements was the offence that cost the Manchu imperial regime in 
China its life in a.d. 1911, as it had been the cause of the Tokugawa 
Shogunatc’s downfall in Japan in a.d. 1867-8. The Manchu Dynasty’s 
doom had been sealed by its supreme and unpardonable offence of 
having owed its reprieve, eleven years back, to the bayonets of the alien 
international expeditionary force that had raised the Boxers’ siege of the 
Legation Quarter in Peking; and the execution done by the Western 
sword with which the Boxers had perished 1 in a.d. 1900, and the T’aip’ing 
before them in a.d. 1864, 2 like those militant Jewish followers of Thcudas 
and Judas who had once ventured to try conclusions with the Romans, 3 
did not deter a third generation of Chinese Zealots in a.d. 1925 from 
rushing into a fresh campaign of militancy which, in the teeth of all the 
forbidding precedents, was to justify itself by its success in bringing 
about the progressive abolition of ‘the Unequal Treaties’: 

Moreover, the ambivalence which we have found pervading all phases 
and aspects of the Japanese psychological reaction to the impact of the 
Modern West was discernible in the Chinese arena likewise in at least 
two movements. We have just now classified the T’aip’ing as a Zealot 
revolt against a semi-alien Manchu imperial regime which, in Zealot 
Chinese eyes, had forfeited any mandate to which it might have been 
able to claim title through its failure to prevent the unceremonious 
pioneers of a wholly alien Western World from breaking their way into 
the Middle Kingdom’s sacrosanct precincts by force of arms. But such 
an account of the T’aip’ing would be misleadingly incomplete if we did 
not go on to remind ourselves that the inspiration of its founder Hung 
Hsiu-ch’uan’s mountain-moving faith had come, not from the Confucian 
Classics, which he had studied without showing the ability required to 
qualify as a littcratus, but from tracts compiled by a Chinese convert of 
a Protestant Western Christian missionary; 4 and the Western manu¬ 
facture of the spring that thus released this Chinese prophet-pretender’s 

1 Matt. xxvi. 52. 

1 A Manchu regime whose old-fashioned troops had signally failed to suppress the 
T’aip'ine had owed its salvation in this crisis to a new-model force organized and led for 
it by a Western mercenary soldier who consequently came to be known among his 
compatriots as 'Chinese Gordon'. 

> Acts. v. 36-37- * See V. v. 107, n. 1. 



ZEALOTISM AND HERODIANISM 597 

energies requires us to enter his name in the Herodian column of our 
inventory as well. 

This recourse to the device of double entry was also the only adequate 
method of classifying the more recent phenomenon of Chinese Com¬ 
munism; for, while this movement, too, had an indisputable claim to a 
place in the Zealot column on the score of its implacable enmity towards 
its Herodian contemporary and rival the Kuomintang, the subtly per¬ 
vasive taint of Herodianism also betrayed itself in the war-gear of a 
Chinese anti-Western movement that had borrowed the ideology of 
Communism from a Russian armoury; for Russia was not herself the 
artificer of the Marxian thunderbolt, but had imported this ideological 
weapon for her own use from the forge of a nineteenth-century Western 
hcresiarch before re-exporting it to China for employment on the local 
anti-Western front in a ‘cold war’ that was then coming to be waged on 
an oecumenical scale. 

In the psychological reactions of the pre-Columbian civilizations in 
the Americas to the appalling advent of militarily irresistible aggressors 
from a previously quite unheard-of and all but undreamed-of alien 
world overseas, the Zealot heroism of the Inca ‘die-hards’, who held out 
in an Andean mountain-fastness for thirty years after the Empire of the 
Four Quarters had fallen before the horse-hoofs and the fire-arms of 
the Spanish conquistadores , 1 flared up again, more than three hundred 
years later, in the insurrection of a pretender to the tragically inspiring 
name of Tupac Amaru in a.d. 1780-3 ; 2 but this vein of Zealotism in an 
overwhelmed Andean cosmos was balanced in the original Tupac 
Amaru's generation, on the morrow of the conquest, by the Herodianism 
of half-breed children of Spanish conquistadores and Inca mothers. The 
work of the half-breed Jesuit Father Bias Valera perished in manuscript, 
before publication, in the siege of Cadiz by the English in a.d. 1596, 3 but 
the work of his fellow half-breed Garcilaso de la Vega 4 (vivebat a.d. 
1540-1616) was preserved to be the principal repertory of the Incas’ 
traditions about themselves in the libraries of these Andean empire- 
builders’ Western supplanters. This soldier-historian had gathered his 
ancestral traditions in his Quichuan mother-tongue from the survivors 
of the last generation of antediluvian Inca grandees before he left his 
Andean fatherland for ever at the age of twenty to serve on European 
battlefields as an officer in the Spanish Army; but he survived thirty 
years of military service to set down on paper in Castilian at Cordova in 
his riper years the oral information that he had garnered in Quichuan at 
Cuzco in his boyhood. 

This evanescent Herodianism of a handful of half-breeds belonging to 
a single generation in the sixteenth century is a less impressive instance 
of the Herodian psychological reaction in the Andean World than the 
subsequent miracle of the adoption of the current Western Civilization 
in a Catholic Christian medium by the Guarani transfrontier barbarians 

» See V. vi. aij. * See I. i. 120. n. x. 

3 See Baudin, L.: I'Empire Socialise des Inka (Paris 1928, Institut d’Ethnologie), 
p. 12, n. 3. 

* A note of Garcilaso de la Vega's career will be found ibid., p. 12. 



598 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
in Paraguay en masse. In the Paraguayan ‘reductions’ the spell-binding 
charm of the Jesuits’ Orphean music worked the magic of securing a 
truce to the ferocity which these Western Christian culture-heroes’ tem¬ 
porarily docile Guarani converts, pupils, and proteges had displayed, 
before this interlude, as barbarian invaders of the Andean World, and 
which they were to display again as cannon-fodder in the international 
and civil wars of the Latin-American successor-states of the Spanish and 
Portuguese Empires. This summer of unwonted peace and prosperity 
between two bouts of frantic militarism lasted in Paraguay for the best 
part of two centuries (circa a.d. 1580-1773) and was terminated only by 
the Spanish Crown’s wanton crime of liquidating an idyllic hicrocracy.' 

When we turn our eyes from the Andes to Central America, we find 
there an illustration of the Herodian reaction in the readiness with 
which a subjugated indigenous peasantry in the Spanish Viceroyalty of 
New Spain embraced a version of a Tridentinc Catholic Christianity in 
Which the natives’ Castilian religious instructors discreetly overlooked 
the infusion of a reassuring alloy of their converts’ pristine paganism. 
On the northern fringes of the same Mexic World the antithetical ethos 
of Zcalotism displayed itself in the gentle persistence with which an 
indigenous religion and way of life were treasured by the Pueblo and 
other agricultural sedentary communities that had been ceded by the 
Republic of Mexico to the United States in a.d. 1848; while, still farther 
afield, among the Nomadic hunting tribes of North America, the same 
Zealot spirit gave birth to new indigenous religions 2 under the agonizing 
ordeal of an assault by which these most unhappy of all American 
victims of aggression from overseas were being deprived, not merely of 
political freedom, but of the possibility of continuing to lead an ancestral 
way of life that had depended on a freedom to range over their now 
stolen hunting grounds. 3 

In the psychological reactions in the Central American World we also 
find examples of the phenomenon of ambivalence. The revolution that 
broke out in Mexico in a.d. 1910 might look, on the surface, like a social 
conflict in which the line of division between the combatant parties con¬ 
formed to the conventional Western pattern of the day; yet a more 
penetrating eye would discern that these Mexican laymen, peasants, and 
workers in revolt against prelates, landlords, and employers who were 
largely of West European and North American provenance were also 
Zealot champions of a submerged Mexic culture against the ascendancy 
of an alien civilization that had originated in the Old World. In a neigh¬ 
bouring section of the same continent in an earlier generation the savage 
military resistance offered to the encroachments of White Men from 
overseas by Apaches, Comanches, and other Indian denizens of the 
Great Plains who had learnt from their assailants the Eurasian art of 

« For the work of the Jesuits in Paraguay, sec Cunninghame Graham, R. B.: A Van¬ 
ished Arcadia, 2nd ed. (London 1924, Hcincmann), and O’Neill, G.: Golden Years on 
I he Paraguay (London 1934, Bums, Oates, & Waahbourne). 

1 See V. v. 328-32. 

3 The contrast in fithos between the Plains Indians and the Pueblos is brought out 
by Ruth Benedict in Patterns of Culture (Cambridge, Mass. 193«. The Riverside Press), 
pp. 78-95 • The resistance of the Plains Indians is examined on pp. 630-50, below. 



ZEALOTISM AND HERODIANISM 599 

horsemanship was likewise impossible to describe adequately without 
calling these fierce warriors both Zealots, in virtue of their recalcitrance 
to their White executioners’ lethal designs, and Herodians, in virtue of 
their receptivity in borrowing from their adversaries an imported ani¬ 
mate weapon which was providentially apt for use in a hitherto horseless 
‘Centaurs’ paradise’. 

In the psychological reactions of the Jewish fossil of an extinct Syriac 
Civilization to an encompassing and oppressive Western Christendom 
among which this Jewry was dispersed, we shall find a classical illustra¬ 
tion of Zealotism in the meticulous observance of the Mosaic Law by 
orthodox Jews who had faithfully followed Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai’s 
admonitions to seek in the practice of this social drill their palladium for 
preserving their distinctive communal identity in diaspord; and in the 
same field we shall also find a classical illustration of Herodianism in 
the whole-heartedness and the virtuosity with which all the Jews in 
the West—Ritualists, Liberals, and Zionists alike—participated in the 
secular activities of the Western Gentile World on the economic plane. 

In a Late Modern Western World in which the walls of the ghetto 
had fallen at the sound of a Revolutionary French trumpet, a latter- 
day Liberal School of Jews seized the opening thus offered to them 
for carrying their Herodianism beyond the economic plane on to the 
political and the personal. When once the pungent elixir of Rabbini¬ 
cal Judaism had been volatilized in the Jewish Liberal’s Late Modern 
Western intellectual crucible to a degree of insipidity at which a Jewish 
citizen of the Netherlands, France, Great Britain, or the United States 
could be described as 'a Dutchman, Frenchman, Englishman, or Ameri¬ 
can of Jewish religion’ not less accurately than his Gentile fellow 
Liberal and fellow countryman could be given the corresponding label 
of a Dutchman or what-not of such-and-such a Christian denomination, 
it became comparatively easy, in the intellectual and emotional environ¬ 
ment of an ex-Christian Liberal World, for latter-day Jewish Herodians 
to carry the process of assimilation to the further stage of abandoning 
even their formal membership in a Jewish community and intermarry¬ 
ing with neighbours and fellow citizens of Gentile origin. What sense 
was there, for a Liberal’s rational mind, in a Mosaic ban that debarred 
Jews from conmibium with Gentiles with whom all Jews in diaspori must 
always practise commercium in order to earn their daily bread ? 

The effort of breaking with traditional Jewish habit and prejudice 
which was entailed in such a defiance of a Mosaic tabu on mixed mar¬ 
riages might come easiest when the parties could meet and mate on a 
common ground of cx-Jewish and ex-Christian religious agnosticism; 
but an ex-Jew who had gone that far would no longer find it very diffi¬ 
cult to pay a tribute to conventionality at a cheap rate by submitting to 
the formality of a baptism that would purchase for him a nominal mem¬ 
bership in one of the less unfashionable of the Christian churches of the 
day. The anti-clockwise pilgrim’s progress of the Jewish Herodian in a 
Late Modern Western World had illustrated the facility with which 'one 
thing leads to another’ by going to these lengths before an outraged 
Moses was vindicated and avenged by a maniac Hitler who provided 



600 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
himself with pariahs for penalization more Visigothico by routing out 
these ‘non-Aryans’ from the Gentile communities into which they had 
passed so adroitly, in order to thrust them back against their will into 
their deliberately abandoned invidious traditional role of being ‘a pecu¬ 
liar people’. 

At the time of writing on the morrow of a Second World War, both 
the Herodian ‘non-Aryan’ and the Zealot Ritualist survivors of the 
Jewish diaspora in the Western World had lost the lead in a Western 
Jewry to a Zionist movement that differed from both these other dias- 
poran reactions alike in displaying an ambivalent affinity with both of 
them simultaneously. 1 

The Zionists’ deliberate and enthusiastic recultivation of a distinc¬ 
tively separate Jewish consciousness stamped them with the authentic 
hall-mark of Zealotism. Yet these Zionist Neo-Zealots were anathema 
to diasporan devotees of the Ritualistic Zealot tradition inaugurated by 
Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai, in whose eyes the Zionists were guilty of 
flagrant impiety in presuming to bring about on their own initiative a 
physical return of the Jewish people to Palestine which it was God’s 

f rerogative to accomplish at His own good time according to Agudath 
srael’s hyper-orthodox belief. And, even when the Zionists had partially 
attained their objective manu militari, the Jewish Ritualists’joy at having 
lived to see the Mosaic Law reinstituted in a reconquered Erctz Israel 
must have been damped by the observation—to which no sharp-sighted 
lover of this Law could blind himself—that the Zionists had been moved 
to re-enact the Torah by the same cynical motive of making religious 
formalities serve secular purposes as had animated the ‘non-Aryan’ 
candidates for Christian baptism. 

On the other hand, in the Assimilationist Jews’ estimation, the 
Zionists’ Herodian loss of their ancestral Jewish faith was a common 
experience that did not avail to atone for a Zealot vein in Zionism which, 
in the Assimilationists’ eyes, was deplorably retrograde. The Assimila- 
tionists could not bear the Zionists’ relapse into their common ancestors’ 
irrational Zealot belief that the Jews were ‘a peculiar people’. Yet an 
orthodox Jewish polemical theologian, or even a neutral Gentile scien¬ 
tific observer, who chose to charge the Zionists with being guilty of the 
same crime of ‘Assimilationism’ as those avowed Assimilationists who 
gloried in the name, would not have found it difficult to secure a con¬ 
viction. 

The truth was that, while the professed Assimilationists were seeking 
to assimilate themselves individually to their individual Gentile neigh¬ 
bours, the Zionists were unavowcdly aiming at the same objective of 
assimilation in the more radical form of a corporate transformation of 
the Jewish community into the likeness of ‘all the nations’ 2 of a Western or 
Westernizing World in which a latter-day Jewry found itself living. The 
Zionist prisoner in the dock would, no doubt, protest that his aim, in part¬ 
ing company with the non-violent Jewish Zealots of Rabbi Johanan ben 
Zakkai’s school, was not to arrive by a better alternative road at the goal 
of assimilation which was his Liberal Jewish contemporary’s Herodian 

1 See II. iL 252-4. 2 x Sam. viii. 5 and 20. 



ZEALOTISM AND HERODIANISM 601 

objective, but was, on the contrary*, to reinvigorate a tame non-violent 
rendering of the theme of Jewish Zcalotism by reverting to the militancy 
of those Theudases and Judases who had come so promisingly near to 
success in the glorious years a.d. 66-70, 115-17, and 132-5. 1 But, even 
if this hypothetical plea of our imaginary Zionist defendant had not been 
open in a.d. 1952 to being impugned by a damningly odious comparison 
of it with the speculations of some irreclaimable contemporary German 
chauvinist on Germany’s chances in a third world war, it would have 
been confuted by the evidence of the historic sicarii themselves, if Jewish 
Zealots of the classical period could have been raised from the dead to 
be placed in the witness-box by the counsel for the prosecution. 

We may be sure that these inexpugnably authoritative witnesses, so 
far from being grateful to the Zionist in the dock for having cited them 
as his revered exemplars, would have scornfully dissociated themselves 
from him after pointing out to the Court that the Zionist’s ideology' did 
not vindicate but bewrayed him. In basing the Jewish people’s title to 
the soil of Eretz Israel on the physical ground that they were a master 
race in virtue of having Abraham for their father, 1 the Zionist was un¬ 
wittingly testifying that he had been ensnared by the lure of a post- 
Modcrn Western Gentile Racialism in which a Late Modern Western 
Gentile Nationalism had denounced itself, through the self-exposure of 
a sclf-caricature, as being the naked Neo-Paganism that it was. In pur¬ 
suit of this inveterate Gentile idolatry in the particularly sinister form of 
Man’s self-worship of a human herd, the Zionist Jewish addict to a 
pagan cult of ‘blood and soil’ had abandoned his fathers’ faith that the 
Jews were a chosen people in virtue of God’s grace in having con¬ 
descended to make a covenant with Abraham and his seed in which the 
Lord’s choice of Israel was conditional upon Israel’s continuing to obey 
the Lord’s commandments. In thus leaving God’s will and Israel’s 
conduct out of his reckoning, the Zionist was parting with the spiritual 
ground which was the only sure basis for the Jews’ title to the soil of 
the Holy Land just because this orthodox version of the traditional 
Jewish faith compelled the faithful who adhered to it to recognize, with 
fear and trembling, that their privilege was contingent upon their keep¬ 
ing faith with their Maker and Chooser. What surer way of losing 
Jewry’s title could the Zionists have devised than to deviate, in the 
blindness of a pagan hybris, into the delusion that a revocable grant 
from Almighty God was an inalienable birthright automatically trans¬ 
mitted through the physical medium of an Abrahamic blood-stream? 

It will be seen that Zionism betrayed its ambivalence by laying itself 
open to simultaneous charges of Iferodianism and Zealotism which, 
unfortunately for the Zionists, did not cancel one another out. 

The psychological reactions in the Islamic World to the aggression of 
a Late Modern Western Civilization were strikingly reminiscent of the 
reactions to Hellenic aggression in Jewry during the two centuries 
ending in a.d. 135. 

The insurrections of Jewish militant fanatics embattled on the desert 
fringes of Palestine against Idumacan tctrarchs and Roman procurators 

» See V. v. 68. * Matt. iii. 9. 



6oz AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 

who had been invested by Caesar with the stewardship of the former 
dominions of Herod the Great had their counterpart in the fanatical 
outbreaks of the Wahhabi, IdrlsI, Mahdist, and Sanusi Muslim puritans 1 
who sallied out of their fastnesses in the Najd, ‘Asir, Kordofan, and the 
desert hinterland of Cyrenaica on the forlorn hope of overthrowing an 
Ottoman regime which, in their censorious eyes, had proved itself un¬ 
worthy of its pretension to be the heir of the Caliphate. As these Islamic 
Zealots saw it, the Padishah had aggravated a heinous first ofFence of 
losing the military and political initiative to his infidel Western adver¬ 
saries by committing the unpardonable second ofFence of allowing the 
Ottoman body politic to become a channel for the infection of the heart 
of Dar-al-Islam with the triumphant infidel’s contaminating influence. 
In this light, nineteenth-century Ottoman sultans and pashas cut the 
same odious figure as the Herods and Pilates had once cut in the sight 
of leaders of a Zealot Jewish resistance movement; and the lamentable 
spectacle of the Theudases and Judases falling suicidally upon devour¬ 
ing Roman swords was duly reproduced in the execution done by 
Modern Western weapons when the Najdl Wahhabis were smitten by 
Ibrahim Pasha, the Sudanese Mahdists by Kitchener, 2 the Libyan 
Sanusls by Graziani, 3 and the MaghribI patriot leaders, an ‘Abd-al- 
Q§dir in Algeria and an ‘Abd-al-Karlm in the Moroccan Rif, 4 by 
Bugcaud 5 and by Boichut. Only the Pathan highlanders 6 in an East 
Iranian no-man’s-land between a now independent Pakistan and a still 
independent Afghanistan had succeeded, down to the time of writing, 
in emulating in a latter-day D 5 r-al-Islam the Arsacids’ and Sasanids’ 
feat of thwarting all Roman attempts to recapture for Hellenism an ‘Iraq 
and a Western Iran that Arsacid arms had salvaged for Zoroastrianism 
from the Hellenic domination of the Romans’ Seleucid predecessors. 

These latter-day Islamic reproductions of Zealot Jewish prototypes 
were balanced, in the same chapter of Islamic history, by avatars of the 
Herodians’ eponymous Idumaean hero, the great son of Antipater him¬ 
self, in the titanic Herodian figures of a Mehmcd ‘All Pasha (thrown into 
relief by his reactionary grandson and successor ‘Abbas I), a Sultan 
Mahmud II, and a Ghazi Mustafa Kcmal Ataturk who, in his own life¬ 
time, was successfully imitated in Persia by a Riza Shah Pahlawi and 
was unsuccessfully parodied in Afghanistan by an Am 3 nallah; 7 and we 
have already observed that Riza Shah’s and Ataturk’s radical Herodian 
reforms 8 had been anticipated by an abortive Westernizing revolution 
in Persia in a.d. 1906 and in Turkey in a.d. 1908. 9 

I Sec V. V. 294-5 and 324, and V. vi. 227. 

» Sec Theobald, A. B.: The Mahdiya, A History of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, 1881- 
189$ (London 1951, Longmans, Green); Trimingham, J. S.: Islam in the Sudan (London 
1949, Oxford University Press). 

J An account of the warfare in Libya between the Sanusis and the Italians during 
the years a.d. 1911-32 will be found in Evans-Pritchard, E. E.: The Sanusi of Cyrenaica 
(Oxford 1949, University Press), chaps. 5-7. « See V. vi. 227. 

J 'Abd-al-Qidir’s surrender was actually received by Bugeaud’s lieutenant Lamo- 
riciire. 

• Sec V. v. 30578 and 332-3, »nd V. vi. 228. 7 See V. v. 333. 

* The imposition of Western dress in Turkey, Persia, and Afghanistan has been 
noticed in V. vi. 102-3, and the imposition of the Latin Alphabet in Turkey ibid., on 
pp - " 2_, 3 - 

« The temporarily successful constitutionalist revolution in Turkey in a.d. 1908 was, 



ZEALOTISM AND HERODIANISM 603 

On the other hand the Islamic Society may be credited with originality 
in having given birth to two nobly tragic martyrs to Herodianism in the 
persons of an imaginatively prescient Sultan Selim III and a bene¬ 
ficently efficient Midhat Pasha, while the doubtful honour of producing 
such oddly compounded monsters as Zealot-drones, for which it might 
be hard to find a precedent in Syriac history, was shared by the Islamic 
Society with the Russian branch of Orthodox Christendom, where the 
massacre of the Janissaries by Selim Ill’s cousin and avenger Mahmud 
II, and the massacre of the Mamluks by Mehmcd ‘All, had been antici¬ 
pated in the massacre of the Streltsy by Peter the Great. 

There was, however, a residual tinge of Zealotism even in Mehmcd 
‘Ali’s aggressively Herodian Sthos; 1 and in the writer’s day the Islamic 
World had produced an unmistakably ambivalent culture-hero in the 
kingly person of an ‘Abd-al‘Azi2 b.‘Abd-ar-Rahman Al Sa'ud, 2 the 
restorer of the fortunes of his house and sect who proved himself a suc¬ 
cessor of his Wahhabi Zealot forebears when he purged the Haramayn 
in the Hijaz of the taint of idolatrous corruption after his conquest and 
annexation of the Islamic Holy Land, but went on to prove himself also a 
successor of those same primitive Wahhabi Zealots’ Herodian Ottoman 
bugbears when he set himself to consolidate the political independence 
of a salvaged Arabia by coaxing his turbulent and fanatical tribesmen to 
exchange the nomadic shepherd’s leisure for the labours of a sedentary 
husbandry in oases whose productivity Ibn Sa'ud did not hesitate to 
multiply by resorting to the unhallowed Western technique of boring 
artesian wells. When the Badu had thus been broken in to an Herodian 
revolution in their way of life, it was less difficult for their Janus-faced 
patriarch to provide himself with the financial sinews of war or welfare 
by earning royalties from leases granted, with his now semi-domesti¬ 
cated Badawi subjects’ acquiescence, to American entrepreneurs who 
were thirsting to tap the liquid mineral wealth of an Arabian desert’s 
subsoil by probing it, not now for water, but for oil. 

In the reaction to the West in the Hindu World the Islamic Zealotism 
of Wahhabi, IdrlsI, Mahdist, and Sanusi puritans had its psychological 
counterpart in a Zealot revival of an orgiastic Kali-worship and recul¬ 
tivation of a desiccated Vedic lore, while the Brahmans’ Zealot-minded 
anxiety to elude the ritual contamination that they would have incurred 
through eating and drinking in the company of their British ‘fellow 

as we have seen, the work of a ‘New 'Osmanli' movement which had made its first 
abortive attempt to turn the Ottoman Empire into a parliamentary constitutional state 
alia Franca as early as the third quarter of the nineteenth century. A recent Western 
student of this episode of Ottoman history had summed up his appreciation of the policy 
of NSmyq Kem 41 , one of the leading 'New ‘Osmanli’ publicists of the pioneer generation, 
by putting it that ‘his aim was to regenerate the state by borrowing from the West the 
means to oppose to the West a stronger and more united nation’ (Davison, R. H,: 
Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1S56-1876 (thesis submitted to Harvard University for 
the degree of Ph.D., xst April, 1942), p. 241 of the typescript copy in Harvard Univer¬ 
sity Library, quoted here by permission). This sentence puts in a nutshell the objective 
that is the common goal of all Hcrodians. 

1 In his Report on Egypt ar.d Candia of the 27th March, 1839 (London 1840, Clowes), 

C 30, Sir John Bowring records the Egyptians’ confident belief that they had now 
imt enough from their Frank instructors in Western technique to be able to afford to 
dispense with their costly services—though, in Bowring’s own opinion, experience had 
proved the contrary (cp. ibid., pp. 48 and 151). 2 See V. v. 333-4. 



6o 4 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
Aryans’* was amusingly reminiscent of the Pharisees’ similar embarrass¬ 
ments in their unavoidable contacts with their uncircumcized Roman 
lords and masters. Yet these ritualistic scruples did not deter Brahmans 
from deliberately setting foot within an unclean British lion’s den in 
order to serve the new alien rulers of India as administrators, in the 
footsteps of those Brahmans of earlier generations who had served the 
now fallen Muslim predecessors of the British in the same capacity. The 
British empire-builders’ Brahman coadjutors equipped themselves for 
this Herodian profession of their choice by learning English 2 with the 
same industry and virtuosity that their fathers had shown in learning 
Persian. 3 

In this post-Mughal phase of the Hindu Society’s experience of alien 
political domination, Brahmans, as well as Kshatriyas, extended the 
breadth of their front on their Herodian line of march by also taking 
service in the professional armies, on a Western model, that were raised, 
in and after the later decades of the eighteenth century, by a variegated 
pack of Hindu, Muslim, and Western adventurers who were now con¬ 
tending with one another in a competition to carve successor-states out 
of the carcass of a defunct Timurid Mughal Empire. When a combina¬ 
tion of two complementary reductive processes—destruction and absorp¬ 
tion—had duly reduced these inchoate Westernizing military forces on 
Indian ground first to the two surviving military establishments of a 
British East India Company and a Sikh war-lord Ranjit Singh, and finally 
to one sole surviving British Indian Army, as a result of a hundred years 
of costly experimentation in ‘the survival of the fittest’, this Western- 
organized, Western-trained, and Western-officered Indian military 
machine fed by voluntary enlistment kept open a wide vent for Hindu 
Herodian proclivities—at first mainly among the so-called ‘martial races’ 
of the North-West, 4 but eventually also among Hindus of all castes and 
quarters whom a Western education had qualified and inspired to be¬ 
come candidates for officer-cadetships in an Indian Army when the cadre 
of officers was deliberately and rapidly ‘Indianized’ in the last phase of 
the British regime. The strength and volume of a Hindu Herodian 
movement that had been gathering momentum for the best part of two 
hundred years, as its triple stream swept forward down a military, an 

! The mirage of a common physical stock to which latter-day Hindus and latter-day 
Europeans alike could trace back their descent had been conjured up by the un¬ 
warranted inference that the existence of 'an Aryan race’ was implied in the authentic 
discovery of an Urtpraeht from which all the latter-day languages of an ‘Indo-European’ 
family were genuinely derived. In India under a British Raj, this mistaken physiological 
induction from a correct linguistic premiss was not taken sufficiently seriously to move 
either the Brahman to sit at tabic with the Englishman or the Englishman to elect the 
Brahman to membership in his club. It was left for the Nazi fellow countrymen of Bopp 
to exploit the Aryan racial myth as an instrument of torture for use in their persecution 
of the Jews long after it had become manifest to scholars that there was little or no corre¬ 
spondence between the family-trees of languages and the genealogies of races. Such a 
mischievous use does not appear ever to have been made of the analogous legend of a 
common origin of the Spartans and the Jews that was invented to serve current political 
purposes in the post-Alexandrine Age of Hellenic history'. 

J See V. v. 507. 

J The Brahmans’ linguistic prowess was the more praiseworthy inasmuch as most of 
them remained unaware that these graceless alien tongues which they were mastering 
from a utilitarian motive were akin to the sacred Sanskrit in which they themselves were 
zealous litterati. 4 See II. ii. 128, n. 1. 



ZEALOTISM AND HEROD IAN ISM 605 

administrative, and also an industrial channel, was demonstrated in and 
after the summer of a.d. 1947, when the management of an Indian 
Union was successfully taken over from British hands by an efficient 
working party of Hindu statesmen, staff officers, and business men. 

In previous contexts attention has been drawn to the ambivalence of 
the reaction of a Mahatma Gandhi whose conduct of his Zealot cam¬ 
paign for a radical severance of the economic threads implicating the 
Hindu Society in a Western way of life revealed this Hindu Janus’s 
Hcrodian counter-face in both the Quaker-minded gentleness and the 
publicity-conscious efficiency with which the Gandhian political strategy 
of non-violent non-co-operation was put into action. In this place we 
have only to make the one further observation that a similar ambivalence 
revealed itself in the ethos of a would-be Zealot Arya Samaj, 1 which, 
though founded for the purpose of providing a corrective to the Brahmo 
Sam 3 j’s out-and-out Herodianism, 2 was itself open to the damaging 
charge that it had derived its own anti-Hcrodian inspiration from an 
Herodian sensitiveness to the exotic influence of a Western Romantic 
Movement. 

The psychological reaction to the impact of the Modern West in the 
main body of Orthodox Christendom has come to our notice in the sullen 
retreat of a Zealotism that had still been murderously militant when, in 
a.d. 1638, it had compassed Cyril Loukaris' death in retribution for his 
Herodian crime of Calvinism. Thereafter, the Greek Orthodox hierarchy 
still showed their teeth in occasional rear-guard actions. Their frustra¬ 
tion of Evyenios Voulgharis’ eighteenth-century pioneer educational work 
advertised their disapproval of Herodianism even when this obnoxious 
outlook was confined to the intellectual plane, while their subsequent 
obstruction of the educational activities of nineteenth-century American 
Protestant missionaries betrayed a perhaps less unreasonable suspicion 
that in this case an educational programme might have the conversion 
of souls as its covert ulterior object. Their last losing battle in a Zealot 
cause was fought in opposition to the plans adopted by an Herodian- 
minded post-Mahmudian Ottoman Porte for reforming the constitution 
of the Millet-i-Rum by giving the laity as well as the clergy a place on its 
governing body and by introducing into its organization the latter-day 
Western constitutional devices of representative government by election 
and of parliamentary control over public finance. 

At the same time there was also an Herodian vein in the cultural evolu¬ 
tion of an Ottoman Greek Orthodox Christian oligarchy in this age; for, 
in the course of two hundred years ending in the nineteenth-century last 
stands of clerical Greek ‘die-hards’, a ring of Phanariot Greek families 3 
had secured something like a monopoly of the patronage in the making 
of appointments to the higher posts in the Orthodox ecclesiastical hier¬ 
archy throughout the Ottoman dominions thanks to the wealth and power 
which these Phanariots had won for themselves by entering the Otto¬ 
man public service under unprecedentedly favourable new conditions 
that had been offered to them since the middle of the seventeenth cen¬ 
tury; and the professional asset which had purchased for the Phanariots 

» Sec V. vi. 94. * See V. v. 106. > See II. ii. 222-8. 



606 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
from their Ottoman masters these unwontedly attractive terms of em¬ 
ployment had been the Hcrodian familiarity with the languages, man¬ 
ners, and customs of a contemporary schismatic Western Christendom 
which these Greek Orthodox Christian Brahmans had not disdained to 
acquire for the sake of the increasingly lucrative profits that they found 
themselves able to earn by serving as middlemen in the commerce 
between an Ottoman World and the Occidental ‘Children of Hagar’. 
When these enterprising seventeenth-century and eighteenth-century 
Greek Orthodox Christian merchants had once set their feet on this 
Herodian Broadway, 1 it was not surprising that the rank-and-file of a 
nineteenth-century Ottoman Millet-i-Rum should have followed the 
Phanariots’ lead to Broadway’s terminus by indulging in the more 
hazardous Hcrodian conceit of sorting themselves out, in imitation of 
the Western fashion of the day, into a patchwork of territorially segre¬ 
gated linguistically homogeneous sovereign national states. 

In the Russian branch of Orthodox Christendom the psychological 
reactions to the impact of the Modern West surpassed the contemporary 
reactions in the main body of Orthodox Christendom in the lengths to 
which they ran in both directions. In the irreligiously prophetic figure 
of Peter the Great, 2 Russia produced the archetype of all the high¬ 
handed autocrats who were to impose their Herodianism ‘from above 
downwards’ on their fellow creatures in other societies that were like¬ 
wise confronted with a ubiquitous and inescapable ‘Western Question’, 
while in the opposite swing of her psychological pendulum the same 
Russia reproduced Jewry’s uncompromising Pharisees in her Old 
Believers 3 and Jewry’s desperate Theudases and Judases in her Cossack 

» Malt. vii. 13. 

* Sec III. iii. 278-83. Pcler’s Hcrodian figure cast its Zealot shadow in the shape of 
his son, heir, opponent, and victim, Alexei. 

J See V. vi. 120-1. Some two hundred different sects of dissenters (raikolniki) were 
generated (see Metric, C.: Die Europdisierung Russlands im 18. Jahrhunderte (Gotha 1913, 
Perthes), pp. 161-72) in the last chapter of the pre-Petrine phase of Russian history by 
the liturgical reforms of the Romaicixing Patriarch of Moscow, Nikfln ( pontifical! 
tnunere ]ungebatur a.d. 1652-58 de facto and 1652-66 de jure). Though the issue over 
which they had parted company with the officially Orthodox Russian Church of the day 
was their indignation at an assimilation of current Russian liturgical practice, not to a 
schismatic Western Roman Catholicism or Protestantism, but to the contemporary 
Greek version of Russia’s own cherished Orthodoxy, many of the dissenting Russian 
sects eventually also took a Wahhabi-like stand against Western innovations; and their 
Zealot puritamsm was apt to fasten upon such spiritually neutral ‘Yankee notions’ as 
the cultivation of the Italian style of church music and religious painting, the smoking 
of tobacco, the drinking of tea, and the wearing of Western clothes (ibid., p. 162; 
Brilckner, A.: Peter der Groste (Berlin 1879. Grotc), p.281). This Francophobia was com¬ 
mon ground between the dissenters and their Nikonitc bugbears (sec BrQckner, op. cit., 
pp. 96 and 212), and it was particularly violently excited by Western innovations in dress 
(see the present Study, III. iii. 283, n. 1, and V. vi. 102)—even when these innovations 
were recognized as being merely w-hat they were, and did not give rise to such horrifying 
misapprehensions as the mistaking of wig-stands for idols which led, at Astrakhan in 
a.d. 1705, to an armed insurrection in which the unfortunate bewigged Western officers 
in Tsar Peter’s garrison there were massacred (see Brilckner, op. cit., pp. 287 and 289; 
Sumner, B. H.: Peter the. Great and the Emergence of Ruitia (London 1950, English 
Universities Press), p. 66). This detestation of Western dress was shared with the dis¬ 
senters by their own detested adversaries the patriarchs. The wearing of Western 
clothes was forbidden by Nik6n himself (Brilckner, op. cit., p. 19), and this ban of 
Nikfin’s was repeated by the Patriarch Joachim {fungebatur a.D. 1674-90) in a testament 
(redactum a.d. 1690) in which he also called for the rasing of all churches erected by 
non-Orthodox Christians on Russian soil as a practical way of acting on his general 
warning against ‘Latins, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Tatars’ (Brilckner, op. cit., p. 97). 



ZEALOTISM AND HERODIANISM 607 

militant Zealots Stenka Razin and Pugachev, 1 whose ‘die-hard’ deaths 
put to shame Peter’s drone-like Zealot victims the Streltsy. 

Even a pre-Petrine Imperial Government that had already taken the 
first steps to equip itself with Western armaments proved able to inflict 
on Razin (erupit a.d. 1667-71) the fate that was to overtake Pugachev, 
when he dared to measure his strength against the post-Petrine army of 
the Empress Catherine, and was likewise to overtake the Wahhabis when 
they provoked the Ottoman punitive expedition that was eventually 
launched against them by Mehmcd ‘All. Yet the Petrine regime of 
Catherine and her successors, whose flagrant Herodianism stamped 
them in the Old Believers’ eyes with so indubitable a mark of the Beast 
as to certify their satanic archigetis Peter’s identity with Antichrist, 2 
harboured a lingering residue of Zealotism which betrayed itself in this 
regime’s ecclesiastical policy towards the Uniatc element in the Ukrainian 
and White Russian population that was reunited with a still aggressively 
‘holy’ Muscovite Russia as a result of the three successive partitions of 
Poland-Lithuania between the years a.d. 1772 and a.d. 1795. Though in 
theory the ecclesiastical allegiance of their new subjects ought to have 
been a matter of studied indifference to an Occidentally enlightened 
late-eighteenth-century Russian Imperial Government, the statesmen 
at St. Petersburg nevertheless departed from their professed principle of 
religious toleration by abusing their political power in compelling the 
Orthodox Church’s Ukrainian and White Russian Uniate lost sheep to 
return to Orthodoxy by entering a Muscovite ecclesiastical fold—for all 
the world as if these Voltairian martinets were not quite incredulous of 
the Orthodox superstition that an ecclesiastical association with the 
schismatic Western Church of Rome was a murrain from which these 
infected stragglers from the flock must be decontaminated by being re- 
dipped in Orthodoxy’s sterilizing chrism. 

In our gallery of Janus-faced heads, we have long since observed that 
Lenin’s bust has no rival except Gandhi’s for the distinction of being 
labelled as the most perfect specimen'in the collection. In the vehemence 
of their anti-Western Zealotism, even the fifteenth-century Russian 
Orthodox Christian prelates who led the fanatical Orthodox opposition 
against the Union of Florence were surpassed by the twentieth-century 
Russian Communist opponents of a secularist Liberalism which had 
come to be the prevalent Western ideology of the age; yet the Bolsheviks’ 
Zealot indictment of a contemporary Western way of life was uttered in 
the name of a Western-made Marxian ideology in obedience to which 
the Bolsheviks subjected Russia to an Herodian regimen that made Anti¬ 
christ Peter’s Herodianism seem mild by comparison when the Russian 
soil whose surface Peter’s horse-drawn iron-shod plough had turned 
was cloven to its depths by Stalin’s power-driven adamantine blade. In 
this place we have only to add that the nineteenth-century Russian 
Slavophils had anticipated the Bolsheviks in their ambivalence by draw¬ 
ing their inspiration for a would-be Zealot criticism of the current 

r See V. v. 104 and V. vi. 227. 

3 See BrUckner, A.: Peter der Crone (Berlin 1879, Grote), pp. 274-0; Sumner, B. H.: 
Peter the Great and the Emergence of Rusiia (London 1950, English Universities Press), 
pp. 65-66. 


608 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
Western way of life from an Herodian acquaintance with a Western 
Romantic Movement which was likewise to inspire the Zealot-meant 
gestures of a Hindu Arya Samaj. 

A no less equivocal interplay of Zealot and Herodian motifs accounts 
for the fineness of the water of those pearls of literary art that were 
secreted in a nineteenth-century Russia’s morbidly Westernizing body 
social. The elusive riddle of an Herodian-Zealot Russian literature holds 
a Western reader fascinated as he finds himself sinking below its seem- 
ngly familiar aesthetic surface into the disquietingly alien underworld 
of its spiritual depths; and this magic is no monopoly of 'the inspired 
dog’ Dostoyevski’s mantic genius. It also animates the rarefied atmo¬ 
sphere and subdued colours of the exquisite psychological landscapes 
painted by the naturalized Parisian Turgeniyev. We feel it as we admire 
the masterly portraiture with which, in the character of Bazarov, he 
creates the Janus-faced archetype of the Bolshevik’s forerunner the 
Nihilist.' 

Our tale of Zealots and Herodians would still be incomplete if we 
neglected to round up a few stray goats and sheep from Cain’s and 
Abel’s meeting-ground on the fringes of the Great Eurasian Steppe. An 
Herodianism that cost the crypto-Hellenist Scythian Nomad prince 
Scyles his life at his Zealot tribesmen’s hands in the fifth century b.c. 1 
was practised with impunity in the same Great Western Bay of the 
Steppe in the eighteenth century of the Christian Era by overt converts 
to Orthodox Christianity among the Lamaistic Mahayanian Calmuck 
Nomad subjects of a Petrine Russian Empire, 3 and likewise by the 
Sinomane prince of ‘Wei’ Hiao Wen-ti (regnabat a.d. 490-9), though 
this aggressive Herodian autocrat asked for trouble by going out of his 
way to impose his policy of Sinification upon his ci-devant Nomad To 
Pa fellow tribesmen in the successor-state which his and their barbarian 
forebears had carved out for themselves from a defunct Sinic universal 
state’s carcass. 4 Conversely, we find the lure of the Nomadic life evoking 
an Herodian response in the heart of an Hellenic representative of the 
Sedentary World in the fifth century of the Christian Era and in the 
hearts of Chinese representatives of the same world in the seventeenth 
century. The renegade Greek captive who had transformed himself into 
a Hun warrior by the time when he ran into the Constantinopolitan 
envoy Priscus in Attila’s camp was matched, as we have seen, 5 by 
Chinese settlers who transformed themselves into Manchu ‘bannermcn’ 
in Southern Manchuria. In the gamut of the husbandman’s and business 
man’s psychological reactions to the impact of Eurasian shepherd-kings, 
these two instances of a thorough-going Scythophil Herodianism have 
their antitheses in two outbreaks of a Scythophobe Zealotism that went 
to no less extreme lengths. The Zealot reaction which threw the Mongols 
out of a conquered China in the fourteenth century of the Christian Era 6 

' The ‘Nihilism’ which in Russia was a premonitory symptom of the characteristic 
malady of an intelligentsia has been noticed in V. v. 157. A sensitive appreciation of this 
phenomenon will be found in Wcidli, W.: La Rustic Abtente el Prtscnle (Paris 1949, 
Gallimard), ftp. 1x9-21. 

1 See II. ii. 372, n. 3; III. iii, 28:. n. 2, and 429. n. ». 1 See III. iii. 420. n. 1. 

4 See V. v. 47 T- 8 - s In V. v. 409-10. 4 See V. v. 348-51. 



ZEALOTISM AND HEROD IAN ISM 609 

had been anticipated in the sixteenth century b.c. by a Zealot reaction 
of a no less demonic vehemence which had thrown the Hyksos out of a 
conquered Lower Egypt. 1 

These antithetical ‘Zealot’ and ‘Hcrodian’ types of psychological re¬ 
action which we have found declaring themselves so conspicuously in 
encounters between contemporary representatives of different civiliza¬ 
tions may also be expected, in virtue of the psychic uniformity of Human 
Nature, to be discernible and identifiable in other encounters in which 
the parties represent, not different civilizations, but merely different 
communities within a single world, or different individuals within a 
single community; and, before we bring this survey to a close, it may be 
as well to put this a priori expectation to at least one empirical test. 

After the schism between the Catholic core of a Western Christendom 
and the Protestant flake that split off from it in the Early Modern chapter 
of Western his tor}', there were characteristic manifestations of both 
Zealotism and Hcrodianism in the psychological reactions of the Catholic 
party to this Western family quarrel. 

Wc can trace the Zealot vein in the ecclesiastical sphere in a cult of 
Papal autocracy, as an end in itself, which was inaugurated at the Council 
of Constance (sedebat a.d. 1414-18) by Pope Martin V 2 and was carried 
to its climax at the Vatican Council {sedebat a.d. 1869-70) by Pope Pius 
IX. 3 The same rise of emotional temperature in a Zealot furnace can be 
read on the gauge of ecclesiastical discipline in the difference between 
the relentless severity of a Spanish Inquisition and the relative mildness 
with which the repression of heresy had been conducted by the Roman 
Church before the Spanish Inquisition had come to dominate this field 
of Catholic action, while, in the intellectual field, we can observe a com¬ 
parable difference between the Vatican’s Herodian open-mindedness 
towards a fifteenth-century Italian Renaissance of Hellenism and the 
obscurantism of its resistance to a seventeenth-century indigenous 
Western scientific revolution. 4 On the political plane, too, this Zealot 
vein in the Modern Western Catholic Christian reaction to the challenge 
of Protestantism declared itself in the Spanish Crown’s attempt to insu¬ 
late its Empire of the Indies by immuring this hermit kingdom behind 
a wooden wall of Castilian sea-power. 

On the other hand we see Hcrodianism asserting itself in a Late 
Modern Catholic social environment in the tacit relaxation, in an eigh¬ 
teenth-century Italy, of the seventeenth-century Papal ban on an em¬ 
pirical study of Physical Science without regard for the authority of 
Holy Church’s doctor of secular theology, Saint Aristotle, while, in a 
France where Protestantism had been suppressed by Counter-Reforma¬ 
tory zeal, we see an Herodian crypto-Protestant-mindcdness reasserting 
itself in the successive guises of an abortive Augustinian Jansenism and 
of a triumphant rationalist agnosticism which followed up its conquest 
of France by eventually conquering all the Catholic as well as Protestant 

« See V. v. 351-2. # * See IV. iv. 573-4- 2 See IV. Iv. 638. 

* This scientific revolution was not only a new departure; it was a move in a different 
direction from that of the foregoing Renaissance of Hellenic culture (see the passage 
quoted from Herbert Butterfield, The Origins of Modem Wtslem Science, 1300-1800, 
in X. ix. 67-68). 


B 28®8.vni 


X 



610 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
provinces of a Late Modern Western World. 1 In a French Revolution 
in which the ideas of the eighteenth-century French rationalist philo¬ 
sophers went into action on the political plane, a ci-devant Catholic 
France adopted from her ci-devant Protestant neighbours, Great Britain 
and the United States, the modernized Medieval Western institution of 
a parliamentary national state; and, in this elegantly rounded French 
version, 2 an unattractively angular Anglo-Saxon political attitude was 
eventually adopted—at least in outward show—even by such old- 
fashioned Catholic countries as Spain, Portugal, the Latin-American 
successor-states of the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, and a glcich- 
geschaltet Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. 

The Zealot vein in the Catholic reaction to the eruption of Protestant¬ 
ism in the Modern Western World had its counterpart in the contem¬ 
porary Zealotism of the Safawis’ Qyzylbash devotees 3 whose swords 
achieved the trowel’s work of building a new city of refuge, in the heart 
of an encompassing and indignant Sunni Iranic Muslim World, for a 
long repressed and scattered Shi'ah, while the antithetical Hcrodian vein 
can be detected in Nadir Shah’s unsuccessful attempt 4 to redivert a 
latter-day Shi'i Persia into the Sunnah’s beaten track. 


A Meeting of Extremes 

If we now proceed to take stock of the impressions left on our minds 
by the spectacle that we have just been watching, we may find that these 
impressions are confused and that our minds are correspondingly be¬ 
wildered. As we took the salute from the mixed force under review, the 
Zealot and the Herodian components of these motley troops both made 
a parade, as they presented arms in passing the saluting point, of the 
distinguishing marks blazoned on their respective accoutrements. In the 
conspicuousness of these badges and the emphasis of these gestures 
alike, they were insisting with one accord upon their diversity from one 
another; yet this unanimous assertion of theirs was being contradicted 
all the time by the evidence of our own observant eyes; for the most 
striking of all the impressions made upon us was our observation—as 
frequently repeated as it was perpetually surprising—that the classical 
examples of either one of the two types turned out, as often as not, to be 
also classical examples of the other type of soldier under arms for the 
defence of an assaulted society. 

The list of these Janus-figures that we have been jotting down so 
assiduously turns out, on inspection, to be a veritable roll of celebrities. 
It includes King Mithradates Eupator; the Sicel patriot Ducetius; the 
Sheykh Bedr-ed-Dln of Simav; Guru Nanak the founder of the Sikh 
Church (who had a likewise Janus-faced forerunner in the poet-prophet 
Kablr); 5 all the Japanese statesmen who had been wrestling with the 


1 Sec X. ix. 304-5. 

. 2 Th c of France in Late Modem Western history as an interpreter of English 
ideas which were peptonized by being ’processed’ in a French mill has been noticed in 
III. m. 369-71: IV. iv. 2oo, n. 1; and on p. 517, above. 

3 See I. i. 366-7 and V. v. 661-5. 

* See IV. iv. 231; V. v. 106, 537, and 668. 


See I. i. 399. 



ZEALOTISM AND HE ROD I AN ISM 611 

Western Question for the past four hundred years; Hung Hsiu-ch’uan, 
the father of the T’aip’ing movement in a nineteenth-century China, 
and the twentieth-century Chinese apostles of Communism; the authors 
of the revolution in Mexico that broke out in a.d. 1910; 'the Horse 
Indians’ on the Great Plains of North America; the Zionists; King 
‘Abd-al-'Aziz Al Sa'ud; the Arya Samaj; Mahatma Gandhi; the Slavo¬ 
phils; the Bolsheviks; and the creators of a nineteenth-century Russian 
literature. This dubious array of caprine Zealot sheep and ovine Hero- 
dian goats may well make us sceptical of the authenticity of either of the 
two soi-disant diverse breeds that are both alike represented in the am¬ 
biguous physiognomy of each of these Protean creatures; and we may 
be moved to ask: Then were those contradictory-sounding Zealot and 
Hcrodian slogans ‘Antichrist!’ and ‘Die-hard!’ insincerely rhetorical 
exclamations ? And was that dumb-show of mutual antipathy and opposi¬ 
tion a sly piece of play-acting in which the actors were in collusion to 
deceive us? 

Our Zealot and Hcrodian demonstrators’ now suspect sincerity can 
hardly be vindicated unless the alleged antithesis between their two 
ideologies, which both schools unanimously call upon us to recognize, 
proves to be guaranteed by some objective distinguishing mark in the 
nature of a finger-print or a shibboleth; but none of the marks borne by 
the representatives of cither party will prove, on examination, to be 
either party’s distinctive livery. 

There is, for example, a distinction, empirically traceable in our fore¬ 
going survey, between movements from above downwards and move¬ 
ments from below upwards; and, if we were to make our first test of this 
possible differentia between Zealots and Herodians by applying it to the 
classic case that we have taken as our prototype, a first glance at the rela¬ 
tions between Herod the Great and the Jewish Zealots of his day might 
tempt us to jump to the conclusion that Herodianism could be dis¬ 
tinguished from Zealotism as a policy imposed from above downwards 
on a passion surging up from below. 

This criterion might seem accurately to distinguish a common charac¬ 
teristic of Herod and his forerunner Joshua-Jason from a common 
characteristic of the Maccabees and the Pharisees. It might also appear 
to hold good as between Herod’s Hellenizing patrician contemporaries 
and counterparts in the Philistine and Phoenician city-states and their 
anti-Hellenic kinsmen the insurgent Syrian slaves in Sicily; and, again, 
as between an insurgent Egyptian peasantry and the Egyptian notables 
in the mStropoleis of the nomes who proclaimed themselves philhellenes 
by enrolling themselves as gymnasiasts. A latter-day series of anti- 
Hellenic Zealot movements flying religious colours—a Nestorian and a 
Monophysite Christianity and a more militantly Zealot Islam—all also 
duly respond to our test by patently revealing themselves to be erup¬ 
tions from below upwards. Our criterion fails us, however, when wc 
apply the same test to Zoroastrianism; for here we find an anti-Hellenic 
Zealot movement—likewise flying religious colours—that did not erupt 
from below upwards but was, on the contrary, imposed from above down¬ 
wards by Zealot-minded Arsacid and Sasanid autocrats who ‘established’ 



6 i2 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
a Zoroastrian Church as the official religious organization in their 
dominions. And, if this Zoroastrian Zealot movement from above down¬ 
wards thus proves recalcitrant to our test, we shall find our tentative 
criterion doubly discredited when we light upon the inverse intractable 

E hcnomenon of an Herodian movement from below upwards. Yet we are 
ound thus to characterize the peaceful penetration of the upper levels 
of the Hellenic Society by freedmen successors of insurgent slaves who 
had failed to throw off an Hellenic yoke, and by latter-day missionaries 
of Cybele-worship, Isis-worship, Mithraism, and Manichaeism who 
commended their Oriental religious wares to an Hellenic public by 
putting them into an Hellenic dress. 

If we pass from the field of the encounter between Hellenism and its 
contemporaries to the other plots on our map, we shall meet with the 
same experience. In an encounter between a nascent Western Christen¬ 
dom and the Scandinavians, an Herodian response in the Scandinavian 
World to the Western Christian challenge duly took the form of a move¬ 
ment from above downwards in the kingdoms of Denmark, Norway, 
and Sweden, but could not take effect otherwise than from below up¬ 
wards in the anarchic political environment of Iceland. In the encounter 
between a Medieval Western Christendom and a Russian Orthodox 
Christendom, again, our criterion holds good as between the Hanseati- 
cizing patrician Hcrodians in the city-state of Novgorod, or the Polonizing 
Ukrainian and White Russian nobles in the kingdoms of Poland and 
Lithuania, and the anti-Uniatc Zealot Ukrainian and White Russian 
Orthodox Christian subjects of the Polish and Lithuanian Crowns. But 
what are we to make of the Ukrainian and White Russian Uniates? Are 

we not confronted here with an Herodian movement rising from below 
upwards? And what of those Muscovite autocrats who patronized the 
Orthodox Christian Church? Arc they not unmistakable counterparts 
of the Zealot Arsacid and Sasanid patrons of Zoroastrianism ? And does 
not this affinity identify them for us as being likewise Zealots working 
from above downwards ? 

The farther we proceed, the more frequently our tentative criterion 
fails us. The Phanariot and Brahman ministers of Muslim empire- 
builders, who were Herodians duly transmitting the adopted language, 
dress, and other external insignia of an alien Muslim culture to the lower 
castes of their societies from above downwards, are counterbalanced by 
members of those very lower orders who propagated the same Herodian 
movement from below upwards in the more radical act of becoming con¬ 
verts to Islam. In a Far Eastern World under pressure from the Modern 
West, an Herodianism duly working from above downwards at the 
Chinese Imperial Court under the Ming and Manchu regimes and in 
the Meiji Revolution in Japan is counterbalanced by the spectacle of a 
Zealotism likewise working from above downwards in Japan under the 
Tokugawa rdgime and returning to the charge in the same direction, 
even after the Meiji Revolution, in the subsequent establishment of 
Neo-Shinto as a state religion, while in the same Far Eastern World the 
reactions to Western pressure that come up from below arc more fre¬ 
quently Herodian than Zealot in character. The Zealot eruption of the 



ZEALOTISM AND HERODIANISM 613 
Boxers is counterbalanced here by the Herodianism of the seventeenth- 
century Japanese and eighteenth-century Chinese Catholic Christian 
martyrs; and similar well-springs of Herodianism rising from below can 
be detected in the subterranean heroism of Japanese crypto-Christians 
and secret students of Western learning in defiance of the Bakufu, in the 
recrudescence of conversions to Christianity in nineteenth-century 
Japan and China alike, and in the emergence of the Kuomintang. In the 
submerged indigenous societies in the Americas the aristocratic Hero¬ 
dianism of a Garcilaso de La Vega is counterbalanced by the Herodian 
mass-conversions of Andean, Paraguayan, and Mexican peasantries to 
a Tridcntine Roman Catholic Christianity. 

If we go on to apply our test to the encounter between the Modern 
West and the Islamic World, we shall find it at first sight appearing to 
answer better here. An Herodianism imposing itself from above down¬ 
wards is represented by antitypes of King Herod the Great in the persons 
of Sultans Selim III and Mahmud II, 1 Mehmed 'All Pasha and Midhat 
Pasha, President Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk, RizS Shah Pahlawi, and King 
Amanallah; and this imposing array of Herodian statesmen operating 
from above is confronted by a no less imposing array of Zealot insur¬ 
gents erupting from below: the explosive Wahhabi, Idrisi, Mahdist, and 
SanusI fanatics on the Afrasian Steppe; the romantic patriots 'Abd- 
al-Qadir and 'Abd-al-Karim in the Maghrib; the untamed Pathan 
barbarians in the highlands of Eastern Iran. Yet here, too, we find pheno¬ 
mena that do not conform to our experimental pattern; for those 
‘Zealot-drones’ the Janissaries and Mamluks were incubuses weigh¬ 
ing upon Society from above, not jacks-in-the-box bursting the lid 
by springing up from below. 

In the Hindu Society’s reactions to the Modern West the downward¬ 
working Herodianism of a British Serkar’s Brahman clerks and the 
upward-working Zcalotism of a resurgent Kali-worship and a Neo- 
Vedism conform to our test only to be offset by the anomalously upward- 
working Herodianism of a British Indian Army’s recruits and a Brahmo 
Samaj’s converts. In a latter-day Ottoman Orthodox Christendom the 
Herodianism de haut en bas displayed by Westernizing Phanariot Otto¬ 
man Ministers of State is offset by the Zealotism de haut en bas of an 
anti-schismatic Phanariot Orthodox Christian hierarchy, while Greek, 
Serb, Bulgar, and Ruman nationalists alia Franca anticipate a Chinese 
Kuomintang in propagating Herodianism from below upwards. In 
Russia the classic contrast between Peter the Great’s Herodianism from 
above downwards and the Zealotism from below upwards displayed by 
obstinate Old Believers and explosive Cossack insurgents is blurred by 
the anomalous spectacle of a Zealotism from above downwards which 
reasserted itself in the repression of Ukrainian and White Russian 
Uniatism by an eighteenth-century Petrine Russian Imperial Govern¬ 
ment after Peter the Great had crushed an earlier manifestation of the 


« 'Reform in Turkey, as in Russia (until the mid-nineteenth century), came from 
above, because the rulers were more revolutionary than their conservative subjects’ 
(Bailey. F. E.: British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement: A Study in Anglo- 
Turkith Relations. 1826-1853 (Cambridge, Mass. 194a, Harvard University Press), 
p. 223). 



6 i 4 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
same anomalous phenomenon of a Zcalotism in high places in the act of 
ridding Russia of the incubus of those Zealot-drones the Streltsy. 

In the encounters between Cain and Abel along the borderline be¬ 
tween the Desert and the Sown the Herodianism from above downwards 

S ractised by Scythian, Calmuck, and To Pa khans who cultivated the 
edentary World’s alien way of life within the shelter of city walls, and 
the Zealotism from below upwards that was displayed by the sedentary 
subjects of Eurasian Nomad empire-builders in demonic revolts against 
hated alien masters, are counterbalanced by a Zealotism from above 
downwards through which these harshly oppressive sons of Abel in¬ 
curred their sedentary subjects’ implacable hatred, and by the Herodian¬ 
ism from below upwards that moved Greek and Chinese renegades from 
the ranks of a sedentary society to take service in the armies of Hun and 
Manchu Nomad invaders of the fields and cities of the Children of Cain. 

When we glance, in conclusion, at our two instances of encounters 
between two conflicting ideals within the bosom of a single society, we 
shall find our tentative identifications of Zealotism with movements from 
below upwards and of Herodianism with movements from above down¬ 
wards only partially corresponding with the facts here likewise. In the 
encounter between a resurgent Shi'ah and an encompassing Sunni 
World, Zealotism, it is true, duly erupts from below in the explosion of 
IsmS'Il Shah Safawi’s Qyzylbashys, while Herodianism likewise con¬ 
forms to pattern by emanating from above downwards in Nadir Shah’s 
unsuccessful attempt to undo Shah Isma'il’s work by an exercise of his 
own autocratic power. On the other hand, in the history of the psycho¬ 
logical reactions of a Tridentine Roman Catholic Church that had been 
thrown on to the defensive by the shock of the Protestant Reforma¬ 
tion, the Vatican’s eighteenth-century latitudinarianism vis-a-vis a Late 
Modem Western scientific revolution was an exhibition of Herodianism 
from above downwards that was as exceptional as it was belated. The 
Vatican’s characteristic reaction was the Zealotism from above down¬ 
wards exhibited in a burning of Giordano Bruno which was one of the 
sensational sequels to the Spanish Inquisition’s investiture with the 
supreme command in the Roman Church’s perennial holy war against 
heresy; and the same Zealot spirit moved the Papacy, from the ponti¬ 
ficate of Martin V to the pontificate of Pius IX, persistently to subordi¬ 
nate other considerations to the obsessive over-riding aim of preserving 
and augmenting its own autocratic control over the Roman Church’s 
government. Conversely, the most impressive manifestation of Hero¬ 
dianism in this domestic scene in Western Christendom’s modem life 
was a crypto-Protestant movement which had rocketed up from below— 
driven aloft, like a jet-plane, by the successive explosions of Jansenism, 
Voltairianism, and Jacobinism. 

Now that an empirically observed difference between movements 
rising from below upwards and movements descending from above 
downwards has proved, on trial, not to furnish us with a satisfactory 
criterion for distinguishing Zealots and Hcrodians from one another, let 
us sec whether a likewise empirically observed difference between vio¬ 
lent and gentle responses to challenges will serve our purpose any better. 



ZEALOTISM AND HERODIANISM 615 

A priori this might seem improbable, since our study of schism in the 
body social, 1 which was the context in which this antithesis between the 
spirits of Violence and Gentleness first came to our notice, has shown us 
both spirits manifesting themselves indiscriminately in the responses of 
Proletariat and Dominant Minority alike to the challenge of disintegra¬ 
tion. Yet, if we apply this criterion in turn to our prototype case, at first 
sight it does seem to be valid, as we register the contrast in temper be¬ 
tween Zealot Theudases and Judases, who were spoiling for a fight with 
Roman masters of the World, and a Herod who earned his title to be 
acclaimed as great in statesmanship by his determination to restrain his 
ineptly fanatical Jewish subjects from indulging their mad impulse to 
challenge Rome’s omnipotence. On this showing, we might tentatively 
identify Zcalotism with the violent and Herodianism with the non¬ 
violent vein in an assaulted society’s feeling towards its alien assailant; 
but these provisional identifications also will not stand the test of further 
confrontation with the facts. 

In the classic case in point, for instance, a suggestion that Herod’s 
studious appeasement of Rome certified this appeaser to be a man of 
peace would have been received with bitterly derisive laughter by sicarii 
whose childish schemes for resorting to violence against Herod’s Roman 
overlords had been anticipated by the better calculated violence with 
which Herod had nipped such ‘dangerous thoughts’ in the bud. We have 
lighted here upon a political dilemma that faces every Herodian poten¬ 
tate. The stronger his conviction of the necessity of coming to terms 
with an alien civilization of decisively superior potency, the greater will 
be his sense of the urgency of insisting that his subjects shall fall in with 
his policy; and, if this policy is ever placed in jeopardy of being frus¬ 
trated by violent manifestations of Zealotism on their side, he will deem 
it the lesser evil to meet violence with violence in his struggle to save his 
Herodian statesmanship from being frustrated by the Zealots in his own 
household, rather than to shrink from repressing these wild men by force 
at the cost of allowing them to sweep him into a desperate insurrection 
against a paramount alien Power. He can take no other line if he is not 
to be untrue to himself, for the penalty of capitulation to the Zealots 
would be not merely the negation of the weakling ruler’s own Herodian 
policy; it would also be the death of the community for whose welfare 
he is politically responsible. 

Our prototype-episode also brings to light another point in which our 
tentative equations of Herodianism w’ith Gentleness and of Zealotism 
with Violence both break down. Any Herodian statesman who is in 
earnest will be concerned not only to save his policy from being sabotaged 
by Zealot violence but also to ensure that it shall not be frustrated by 
Zealot passive resistance. 2 A lively awareness of this second, more insi¬ 
dious, danger in Herod’s lucid mind gave his ruthless will the signal to 
chastise awkward Pharisees 3 as well as froward sicarii ; and the states- 

1 In V. v. 35-376. 

1 The non-violent vein in the Zealot Jewish opposition to a post-Alcxandrinc Hellen¬ 
ism has been noticed in V. v. 72-73. 

) The ethos of the Pharisees has been noticed in V. v. 73, n. 4. 



616 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
manlike consistency with which Herod thus meted out chastisement to 
Pharisees and sicarii alike will remind us that Zealots arc no more in¬ 
variably violent than Herodians are invariably gentle. In the encounter 
between a post-Alexandrine Hellenism and its Oriental contemporaries 
the violent Zcalotism inherited by the Jewish sicarii from Maccabec fore¬ 
runners and likewise displayed in the Maccabaean Age by insurgent 
peasants in Egypt and plantation-slaves in Sicily—not to speak of the 
latter-day violence of Zoroastrian Sasanidae and of Primitive Muslim 
Arabs who gave a by then senile Hellenic ‘ascendancy’ its coup de grdee 
—divided the allegiance of Zealotism’s devotees with the gentle fanati¬ 
cism of the Pharisees, Rabbi Johanan ben Zakkai, and the Ncstorian and 
Monophysitc Christian Hellenophobes, while, on the other side, Herod 
the Great was not the only Hcrodian reagent to the impact of Hellenism 
who was drawn into using violence by the exigencies of a policy of 
appeasement. This statesman’s dilemma, which did not beset the non- 
violcntly Herodian Egyptian gymnasiasts, freedmen novi homines, and 
missionaries of Cybele-worship, Isis-worship, Mithraism, and Mani- 
chaeism, inexorably led other Oriental client princes besides the Herods 
into taking repressive measures against their own subjects in pursuance 
of a pacific policy vis-d-vis the Roman Imperial Government which 
invested these appeasers, in their victims’ eyes, with all the Satanic 
attributes of the powers of darkness. 

Our classic test case of the encounter between a post-Alexandrine 
Hellenism and its Oriental contemporaries thus indicates that an empiri¬ 
cally observed distinction between veins of Violence and Gentleness 
does not, in fact, provide us with an objective differentia for distinguish¬ 
ing between Zealots and Herodians; and this indication will be confirmed 
by an extension of our field of vision. 

The Hellenic spectacle of a Herod the Great being drawn into a 
domestic policy of repression in defence of a foreign policy of appease¬ 
ment is reproduced in the political careers of Herodian potentates in the 
histories of other encounters between the representatives of conflicting 
cultures. This was likewise the tragic destiny of the Varangian war-lord 
Vladimir the Great, 1 the Norwegian King Olaf Tryggvason, 2 the Kuo- 
mintang Government of a Chinese Republic, Mehmed 'Alt Pasha, 
Sultan Mahmud II, President Mustafa Kemal Atatiirk, Riz 5 Shah 
Pahlawl, King Amanallah of Afghanistan, the leaders of Greek, Serb, 
Bulgar, and Ruman Orthodox Christian militant nationalist movements, 
Tsar Peter the Great, 3 the Sinomanc To Pa Prince Hiao W6n-ti, Nadir 
Shah, and a Jacobin Committee of Public Safety that set up a Reign of 
Terror in a Revolutionary Paris. 

The successfully violent Herodian potentates in this catalogue of suc¬ 
cesses and failures would have sought to justify their crimes by insisting 
that it was not only better to succeed like a Vladimir and an Atatiirk than 

« See II. ii. 332. ... 1 See ‘bid. 

3 Peter was a believer in the use of violence in dealing with his Zealot-minded sub¬ 
jects, not merely for the negative purpose of suppressing revolts against his policy of 
westernization, but also for the positive purposes of forcing down their throats a West¬ 
ern system of education and a Western industrial technique (see BrQckner, A.: Peter der 
Groste (Berlin 1879, Grote), pp. 514-16). 



ZEALOTISM AND HEROD IAN ISM 6x7 

to fail like an Olaf and an Amanallah, but was also better to make even 
an unsuccessful attempt than to show oneself, like Selim III, 'too proud 
to fight’, 1 or to make, like Scyles, a futilely craven attempt to evade an 
uncscapable issue, or to be manoeuvred, like Midhat, into ‘missing the 
bus’. 2 And these impenitently high-handed Herodian advocates of force 
who had been rewarded by success for having the courage of their con¬ 
victions would not have accepted Selim’s Frankish historical adviser’s 
plea that this ‘Osmanli Herodian’s Norman counterpart Rollo had been 
able to induce his Scandinavian warriors to follow his Herodian lead 
without having to take them by the scruff of the neck, or Scyles’ shaman 
clairvoyant's plea that Scyles’ bloodily terminated crypto-Hellenic life 
within the walls of Borysthenes had been justified posthumously by his 
latter-day Calmuck counterparts’ adroitness in ‘getting by’ with their 
conversion to a Petrine Russian Orthodox Christian culture within the 
precincts of Stavropol. The triumphantly violent champions of Hero- 
dianism would have dismissed this Calmuck and this Norman episode 
as being exceptions which proved their own robust rule, and they would 
have despised the tolerantly latitudinarian Popes of an eighteenth-cen¬ 
tury school as traitors to the august office whose traditional prerogatives 
these Laodiceans were thus permitting to go by default. Nor would the 
red-handed Herodians have been impressed by non-violent Phanariot 
ministers of an Ottoman Porte or non-violent Brahman ministers of a 
Mughal and a British Raj; for they would have pointed out that these 
Herodian-minded civil servants were non-violent by necessity and not 
by choice, since their masters always withheld from them the exercise 
of the power of the sword. 

If, in the teeth of these testimonies and arguments, we still sought to 
vindicate our tentative identification of Herodianism with Non-Violence, 
we could, of course, present a counter-list of non-violent Herodians, in¬ 
cluding the nineteenth-century Jewish Assimilationists in the Western 
World; the whole of the Jewish diaspora—and all other diaspor&s at all 
times in all places—on the economic plane; the Andean and the Mexican 
converts to a Roman Catholic Christianity, ranging from the aristocrat 
Garcilaso de la Vega to the primitive Guaranis; the Japanesc and Chinese 
converts to the same religious faith who died for it as martyrs or lived 
for it in the catacombs; the Japanese pagan martyrs who paid with their 
lives for their secret study of a secular Late Modern Western Science; 
and the Jansenist and Voltairian apostles of a Modem Western Weltan¬ 
schauung who waged their 'cold war’ of aggression against an apprehen¬ 
sively Zealot-minded Tridentine Roman Catholicism with the Orphic 
weapon of propaganda. This list, however, would remain inconclusive 
even if it could be lengthened ad infinitum ; for, if once we have conceded 
that Herodianism is apt to find itself drawn into violence by the exigen¬ 
cies of its own aims when its exponents are political potentates, we have 
implicitly conceded that the spirit of Non-Violence cannot be a distinc¬ 
tive characteristic of the Herodian ethos. 

1 Woodrow Wilion on the 10th May, 19x5. 

1 Neville Chamberlain on the 5th April, 1940, referring to Hitler, who was to mske 
Chamberlain’s taunt recoil on its author's own head before the month was out. 

X 2 


B 2S&S.V1U 



6 x8 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 

Conversely, we shall find, if we complete our application of this test 
to our array of exponents of Zealotism, that the Oriental Zealot reactions 
against a post-Alcxandrine Hellenism are not peculiar in displaying non¬ 
violent as well as violent manifestations. The split in Jewish Zealot ranks 
between sicarii and Pharisees, and in servile Zealot ranks between slave 
insurgents and freedmen arrivistes , is reproduced in a Russian Orthodox 
Christendom in the split between the violence of Stenka Razin or 
Pugachev and the non-violence of the Old Believers, and in an Ottoman 
Orthodox Christendom in the contrast between the martial spirit of 
Maniot and Montenegrin wild highlanders and the tameness of a con¬ 
servative-minded Greek Orthodox hierarchy. On the northern fringes 
of a submerged Central American World the same parting of the ways 
is proclaimed in the piquant juxtaposition of pugnaciously Zealot ‘Horse 
Indians’ and pacifically Zealot Pueblos; and the hunter peoples of North 
America who were engulfed by a tidal wave of immigration from the Old 
World, that was rolling westwards, with irresistible force, from the 
Atlantic seaboard of the United States, were likewise divided between 
pacifists and believers in resistance. If we apply the same test to the 
Jewish diaspork in the Western World, we find here, of course, that the 
non-violent Zealotism of the Ritualist disciples of Rabbi Johanan ben 
Zakkai had been a far older and far more widespread response to the 
challenge of an encompassing alien culture than the recrudescence of 
the spirit of the sicarii among a rabid minority of the Zionist settlers in 
Palestine. 

These instances suffice to demonstrate conclusively that Violence is 
no more characteristic of Zealotism than Gentleness is; and this infer¬ 
ence cannot be cancelled by citing other instances in which the men of 
violence in the Zealot ranks do not appear to be counterbalanced by the 
presence of any men of peace. It might be difficult, for example, to cite 
any non-violent Islamic Zealots to neutralize the cumulative impression 
made on an observer’s mind by the militancy of Wahhabis, Idrlsls, 
Mahdists, Sanusis, Pathans, and Maghribis, whose retort to Frankish 
honey-thieves was to burst furiously out of their plundered hive like 
bees eager to give their lives for the sake of lodging their stings in an 
insufferable aggressor’s flesh. In the Far Eastern World, again, the vio¬ 
lent Zealotism of the Ming, the Tokugawa, and the Boxers appears to 
hold the field unchallenged by the contrary example of any alternative 
non-violent school. Yet these obvious exceptions will not avail to rehabi¬ 
litate a decisively discredited rule. 

Perhaps the clearest proof that Violence is no distinctively Zealot 
spirit is presented by the spectacle of the professional soldiers’ impar¬ 
tially indiscriminate distribution of their forces, of both higher and 
lower quality, between the Zealot and Herodian camps. The most 
highly distinguished of the professional soldiers begotten from encoun¬ 
ters between diverse civilizations had, indeed, been Herodians and not 
Zealots. Peter the Great, Nadir Shah, Mehmed 'All, Mustafa Kcmal 
Ataturk, and Riza Shah Pahlawi were conspicuous representatives of the 
Herodian category. By contrast, the most conspicuous professional 
soldiers whom we have come across in the Zealot hive are the discreditably 



ZEALOTISM AND HERODIANISM 


619 


drone-like latter-day Streltsy, Mamluks, and Janissaries. To find Zealot 
professional soldiers worthy to compare with the most eminent of their 
Herodian brothers-in-arms, we must call up those stalwart Illyrian 
soldier-emperors 1 who showed their mettle in leading the last counter¬ 
attack of a demoralized Hellenism against a triumphant Christianity, 
and those indomitable Spartiatc ‘Peers’* who defended, with their backs 
to the wall, 'the peculiar institution’ of a culturally dissident Hellenic 
city-state which had deliberately parted company with the main body of 
the Hellenic Society in order to march straight into a spiritual desert of 
Militarism at the very moment when the rest of Hellas was emerging out 
of darkness into light. Yet the height of heroism to which a Spartiate 
Leonidas rose gives the measure of the depth of demoralization to which 
his nephew Pausanias sank; and, moreover, if wc expand the Zealot 
contingent in our muster of professional soldiers by bringing up rein¬ 
forcements that are of dubious quality, we shall be bound, in equity, to 
dilute the Herodian contingent likewise by calling up those barbarian 
mercenaries who had been enlisted in the professional military defence 
of Civilization on the anti-barbarian frontiers of so many oecumenical 
empires. 3 

Our now manifest failure in our repeated search for a valid criterion 
for distinguishing Zealots and Hcrodians from one another suggests that 
this quest may be a wild goose chase and prompts us to make a fresh 
attack on our problem from a different quarter. Instead of taking as our 

E int of departure a professed antithesis and antagonism for which we 
ve no better evidence than the two parties’ own concordant, but per¬ 
haps collusive, protestations, let us take the Janus-faced ambivalence of 
many of the most impressive of the soldiers on parade, which is a fact 
open to observation by the spectator with his own unprejudiced eyes, in 
the teeth of the troops’ unsupported and perhaps not disinterested asser¬ 
tions. If wc now remind ourselves of the nature of the emergency that 
has brought both Zealots and Herodians into action, we shall see that 
this ambivalent appearance, so far from being surprising, is actually just 
what we should expect. For both parties alike are engaged in the des¬ 
perate enterprise of counter-attacking an alien enemy force that has 
lodged itself within the gates of their assaulted city. The common objec¬ 
tive of both the Zealot and the Herodian defenders of their common 
home is to retrieve this perilous situation; and, in so far as they may be 
taking different lines, these are merely different tactical approaches to 
an identical strategic objective. 

Moreover, it is manifest that neither warrior can hope to achieve a 
common practical purpose if he insists on pushing his own tactical 
theory to the extremity of its logical conclusions. A Coroebus, accoutred 
in the arms of a fallen foeman, 4 who carried his ruse de guerre to the 
point of falling in, shoulder to shoulder, with his slain adversary’s com¬ 
batant comrades in the enemy assaulting column, would be reducing his 
Herodianism ad absurdum by assisting in the capture of a Troy that 
he had taken up arms to save from falling; and in real life wc do not 

* See V. vi. 207. 2 See III. iii. eo-79. 

1 See V. v. 461-6, and pp. 40-41, above. * Virgil: A triad, Book II, 11 . 383-401. 



620 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
find historical instances of Herodians thus stultifying themselves by a 
suicidal self-caricature. Even those Herodian potentates who have gone 
farthest in imposing an aggressive enemy civilization’s culture on their 
subjects on the technological, economic, social, and intellectual planes 
have usually gone to these unwelcome lengths with the object of thereby 
preserving intact at least the continuity and independence of the com¬ 
monwealth for whose government they have been responsible, while 
nonviolent Herodians whose policy has not been dictated to them by 
any political responsibilities have usually been aiming at the preservation 
of some other element in their own assaulted cultural heritage—for 
instance, an ancestral religion or, at a minimum, the bare memory of the 
submerged society’s former existence through the registration of an 
entry, such as Garcilaso de la Vega made, in the records of the victorious 
aggressor society by whose act the victim society has been sent to join 
the shades in Sheol. 

On the other side of an imaginary line dividing an Herodian from a 
Zealot track, those devoted Jewish and Red Indian violent Zealots 
whose scruples have inhibited them from carrying on their ‘holy war’ on 
the Sabbath Day 1 or from conducting it with the White Man’s weapons 2 
have condemned their own cause to defeat by these sublimely unpractical 
sacrifices on the altar of superstition. By contrast, every practical- 
minded Zealot has made concessions to Herodianism, while every 
practical-minded Herodian has seasoned his own Laodicean philosophy 
with a grain of Zealot salt. On this showing, the Zealot and Herodian 
standpoints look, not so much like two isolated peaks sundered by an 
impassable gulf, as like the upper and lower ranges of the gamut of a 
musical instrument in which the interval between this instrument’s two 
acoustical extremes is bridged by a continuous gradation of intermediate 
notes, and on which the highest and lowest notes of all are seldom or 
never struck by any player who is an even barely competent performer. 

Thus a Zealot who has the common sense and the strength of mind to 
refuse to bring his principle to grief by being guilty of a suicidally pedan¬ 
tic loyalty to it will find himself perforce stepping one pace forward from 
his own bridgehead on to the bridge that spans the gulf between his 
own and his Herodian twin brother’s standpoint; but ‘la distance n’y 
fait rien; il n’y a que lc premier pas qui coute’ ; 3 and, when once this first 
step has been taken, the insidiously potent law that 'one thing leads to 
another’ will guide our Zealot pilgrim’s feet into the way, not of peace, 4 
but of progressive compromise, until it has carried him, pedetemptim et 
gradatim , s right over the keystone of Chinvat’s arch on to the approaches 
towards an Herodian bridgehead on the farther side of an insensibly 
traversed intervening space. 

This self-defeat of Zealotism in its tug-of-war with Herodianism on a 

1 5, cc V ’. v> 3 3 x> n * *• * See ibid - 

1 The Marquise du Deffand {vivtbat a.d. 1730-1823) in a letter of the 7th July, 1763, 

to d’Alembert, apropos of the legend that Saint Denis had no sooner been beheaded than 
he picked up his head in his hands and proceeded to carry it for a distance of two 
leagues (The Oxford Dictionary of Quotation! (London 1041, Oxford University Press), 
p. 562, col. b). 

4 Luke i. 79. j Cicero: Ad Familiaru, Book IX, Letter xiv, $ 7. 



ZEALOTISM AND HEROD I AN ISM 621 

hazardous pitch dizzily overhanging a deadly gulf calls up an image that 
has haunted our imagination once before. We have had a pre-view of 
this play in looking on at the awesomely ironic pageant of the self-defeat 
of Archaism, 1 and in seeing this dumb show translated into a play in 
which the dramatis personae have all been divers impersonations of a 
Protean 'saviour with the time-machine’. 2 In the plot of that psycho¬ 
logical drama the way in which Archaism defeats itself is by passing over 
into Futurism; and we can now see that Zealotism is the psychological 
equivalent of Archaism, and Herodianism of Futurism, in a situation in 
which the internal challenge of social disintegration has been replaced— 
or reinforced—by the external challenge of an alien enemy within the 
gates of the challenged society’s cultural citadel. 

Nor is this the only memory of previous intuitions that we recollect, 
as the spectacle of the metamorphosis of Zealotism into Herodianism 
passes before our eyes. The examples, cited at the close of our foregoing 
survey, of psychological reactions along recognizably Zealot and Hero- 
dian lines in the domestic histories of civilizations are reminders that 
we have also already come across other equivalents of Zealotism and 
Herodianism in studying the intractability of institutions in the course 
of our inquiry into the reasons why civilizations break down. 3 We have 
watched this intractability asserting itself by frustrating Man’s attempts 
to adjust his existing institutions to meet a new situation produced by 
the genesis of new dynamic forces or creative movements within a 
society’s bosom, and we have seen that this frustration may take either 
of the two alternative courses of precipitating revolutions or engendering 
enormities. We can now see that these crises arising from the emergence 
of newly created forces welling up from within arc analogous to the 
crises produced by the impact of newly encountered forces impinging 
from outside, and that the enormities in which a civilization comes to 
grief are fruits of Zealotism, while the revolutions which are the alterna¬ 
tive penalty for maladjustment are no less characteristic fruits of the 
antithetical Hcrodian response to the same challenge. 

The Ineffectiveness of the Zealot-Herodian Response 

If we have been right in our verdict that the ostensible contrast be¬ 
tween Zealotism and Herodianism masks a family likeness, and that 
these two psychological reactions to the intrusion of an alien culture are, 
in truth, merely two variations on an identical theme, we should expect 
to find this affinity of character translating itself into a similarity of 
effect; and, sure enough, we do find the unmasked resemblance between 
Zealotism and Herodianism betraying itself in nothing so patently as in 
their common failure. 

The ineffectiveness of this Zealot-Herodian response to the challenge 
of a cultural assault is manifest in the historic case that w’e have taken as 
our prototype. In Jewry’s encounter with a post-Alexandrine Hellenism, 
neither variant of the assaulted society’s defensive reaction availed 
to achieve the common purpose of finding a solution for Jewry’s Hel¬ 
lenic problem that would be practicable and at the same time tolerable. 

I See V. vi. 94-97. * See V. vi. 213-42. 3 Sec IV. iv. 133-24 5 - 



622 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
Herod the Great and his school of Herodian politiques failed to persuade 
or compel their Zealot-minded compatriots to acquiesce in a political 
autonomy under Roman hegemony which would have given the Pales¬ 
tinian Jewish community a chance of coming to terms with Hellenism 
without losing its own communal identity in its ancestral home, while 
the Zealots succeeded in sabotaging this Herodian policy, only to bring 
the Palestinian Jewish community to the destruction which the Hcro- 
dians had foreseen and foretold as being inevitable if the Zealots should 
once succeed in taking the bit between their teeth. The catastrophes 
of a.d. 70 and a.d. 135 proclaimed the bankruptcy of Herodianism in 
closing the door on the possibility of a cultural compromise between 
Judaism and Hellenism, and at the same time exposed the folly of 
Zealotism by turning a Jerusalem that, in the Zealots’ dreams, was to 
have been the sacrosanct capital of a Messianic Jewish state into the for¬ 
bidden city Aclia Capitolina, whose pagan precincts were placed out of 
bounds for all heirs of the Covenant of Circumcision. 1 Thereafter, any 
Jew who wished to share in the good things of Hellenic life had to pur¬ 
chase his freedom of the Hellenic cosmopolis by making a clean cut with 
his own Jewish cultural heritage, in the fashion set by the Alexandrian 
Jewish Platonist philosopher Philo’s nephew the Roman citizen and 
civil sen-ant Tiberius Alexander, while the only way left open for main¬ 
taining a distinctive Jewish communal life was Rabbi Johanan ben 
Zakkai’s forlorn hope of ritualism-in-diaspord. 

It would be superfluous to call up again the rest of our muster of 
Zealots and Herodians to demonstrate that the same pair of psycho¬ 
logical reactions resulted in the same failure in all other encounters be¬ 
tween an assaulted society and an assailant culture in which the tragedy 
had already been played out to its conclusion by the time of writing; for 
these repetitions of Jewry’s classic experience stand on record in this 
work in our foregoing survey of encounters between contemporaries. 1 
In this place we need only observe that the ineffectiveness of the Zcalot- 
Herodian reaction has been registered implicitly a priori in our identi¬ 
fication of Zealotism with an Archaism that breeds enormities, and of 
Herodianism with a Futurism that precipitates revolutions, since revolu¬ 
tions are confounded with enormities, and futurists with archaists, in 
the common grave of their uniform failure. 

The nature of the corresponding failure of Zealotism and Herodianism 
may be probed to its spiritual essence, below its social surface, by an 
intellect that does not disdain the immemorially ancient symbolism in 
which the subconscious depths of the Soul express intellectually ineffable 
spiritual truths. A poetic imagery in which the spirit reveals itself in the 
physical disguise of water has already given us an insight into the ‘con¬ 
ductivity’ of a universal state; 3 for, when we liken an oecumenical empire 
to the Ocean into which all Earth’s rivers discharge, we find that this 
apparently still and dead expanse of salt water is in constant and creative 
motion, and that the rivers, which appear so mobile and lively by con¬ 
trast, would soon cease to flow if their sources were not perpetually being 
fed by the life-giving rain that is perpetually being distilled from the 

« Act* vii. 8. 1 On pp. 346-453, above. i See VI. vii. 60-61. 



ZEALOTISM AND HERODIANISM 623 

surface-water of the Sea as it perpetually ascends into Heaven. In our 
subsequent study of the spiritual influences derived by transfrontier 
barbarians from their proximity to the body social of a civilization on 
the other side of the limes of a universal state, we have found our insight 
in a simile' in which we have likened this limes to a dam that first con¬ 
verts the upper basin of a mountain torrent into a reservoir and then 
brings the accumulated waters down in spate when the barrage collapses 
at last under a pressure that has mounted to the breaking-point. 

In terms of the same expressive imager)-, we may liken the Zealot- 
Herodian reaction to the riposte contrived by a pixie whose Lake of the 
Woods, inviolate hitherto since the beginning of Time, has suddenly 
and unexpectedly been sullied by the keel, and ruffled by the paddle, of 
an audacious backwoodsman’s canoe. What apotropaic use will this out¬ 
raged pixie’s fury and dismay move her to make of her superhuman 
magic power in order to checkmate the sacrilegious human intruder? If 
her defensive psychological reaction takes a Zealot turn, the Lady of the 
Lake will render her waters unnavigable by freezing them solid, while, 
if it takes an Herodian turn, she will render navigation impossible by the 
alternative retort of draining her lake-bed dry. Whether the sacrosanct 
water is frozen or whether it is drained away, it will have been made 
equally impervious to the passage of a man-made vessel. Yet, in working 
either miracle, the luckless nymph will have betrayed her sub-human 
naivetd; for, in her single-minded anxiety to put the boatman out of 
action, she has lost sight of the dcvastatingly simple truth that Man’s 
sophisticated and hazardous art of navigation 2 comes considerably less 
easy to him than the human biped’s natural method of locomotion. A 
lake that has been closed to navigation by being either drained or frozen 
can be traversed by a land-lubber dry-shod. In short, the nymph will 
have reacted to the human intruder in a way that will have defeated her 
intentions by serving his purposes. So far from effectively arresting the 
invader’s progress, her magic tour de force will have appreciably facili¬ 
tated it. 


3. Evangelism 

Was this uniform self-defeat of Zealotism and Herodianism the last 
word that the oracles of History and Mythology had to speak when 
asked for light on the spiritual consequences of encounters? If it were 
indeed the last, then the outlook for Mankind would be forbidding, for 
then we might be driven to the conclusion that our present enterprise of 
Civilization was an impracticable attempt to climb an unscalable pitch. 3 

This great enterprise was initiated, as we may recollect, 4 by a new 
departure in which Human Nature’s powers of imagination, intrepidity, 
and versatility proved a match for the difficulties besetting the change 
of orientation which Mankind managed to achieve at that momentous 
stage in human history. A Primitive Man, who had long since been 
brought to a halt by an Epimethean direction of his faculty of mimesis 

* See pp. 3-11, above. 1 See II. i. 336-7. 

J This simile of the climber’s pitch has been propounded in II. i. xgz- 5 - 

* See ibid., p. 192. 



624 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
towards his stick-in-the-mud elders and ancestors, now reliberated his 
Promethean tlan' by redirecting this same socially indispensable faculty 
towards creative personalities who offered themselves to him as path¬ 
finding pioneers. How far, a latter-day inquirer was bound to ask him¬ 
self, was this new move going to carry these primitive culture-heroes’ 
epigoni ? And, when its momentum had been exhausted, would they be 
able to draw upon a hidden store of psychic energy by repeating the 
creative stroke with which Moses had once conjured the water out of 
the rock ? 2 If the answer to this last question were to be in the nega¬ 
tive, it would be a bad look-out for a half-baked Man-in-Process-of- 
Civilization; and this was why, for him, an archaistic Zealotism’s and a 
futuristic Hcrodianism’s common curse of ineffectiveness was, in itself, 
so disquieting an omen. 

The omen was disquieting because the Zealot-Herodian reaction in 
particular, like the Archaist-Futurist reaction in general, was manifestly 
an unsuccessful attempt to re-perform the miraculous act by which a 
creative minority of Primitive Mankind had once succeeded in passing 
over from the Yin-state of an apparently hard-set stagnation into the 
Yang-movement of an astounding renewal of progress. In that success¬ 
fully negotiated transition from Primitive Life to Civilization the adop¬ 
tion of the forward-looking attitude had released a creative energy strong 
enough to overcome the backward-looking attitude’s inertia; but, in the 
Archaist-Futurist and Zealot-Herodian reactions of a Civilization in 
trouble, neither of the two formally antithetical component attitudes was 
proving to have any virtue in it. Was this the end of the story? 

Perhaps the true answer to this anxious question was that this might 
well be the end if the whole story was comprised in the history of 
Civilization, but not if Man’s attempt at Civilization was no more than 
one chapter in the story of a perennial encounter between Man and God. 
In the myth of the Flood as recounted in the Book of Genesis, the sequel 
to a cataclysm in which Adam’s brood had been all but annihilated by 
their outraged Maker was God’s proclamation of an ‘everlasting cove¬ 
nant between God and every living creature of all flesh that is upon the 
Earth’. The Creator’s promise to Noah and his salvaged crew was that 
‘the waters shall no more become a flood to destroy all flesh’ ; 3 the token 
of this covenant was the bow set and seen in the cloud; and indeed we 
have discovered, in the act of registering the equal failure of Archaism 
and Futurism, and, likewise, of Enormities and Revolutions, that, in 
either of those two apparently inescapable dilemmas, there is a third 
possibility which offers a hard-pressed Theseus a chance of escaping 
imminent destruction by boldly vaulting between the terrible horns 
on which a Minotaur has been seeking to impale his puny human 
antagonist. 

When Life is challenged by the emergence of some new dynamic force 
or creative movement from within, the living individual or society is not 
thereby condemned to make the futile choice between breaking down by 
perpetrating an enormity and breaking down by detonating a revolution; 
there also lies open a middle way of salvation in which a mutual adjust- 

* See III. iii. 114. * Erod. xvii. 1-7. » Gen. ix. 8-17. 



EVANGELISM 625 

mcnt between the old order and the new departure can arrive at a 
harmony on a higher level which is another name for growth. 1 And 
similarly, when Life is challenged by a breakdown that has become an 
accomplished fact, an individual or society that is striving to recapture 
from Fate the initiative in its fight for life is not condemned to make the 
no less futile choice between the two inherently impracticable escapades 
of attempting to jump clear of the Present up the Time-stream into a 
lost Past and attempting to jump clear down the Time-stream into an 
unattained Future; 2 for, here too, there lies open the middle way of a 
withdrawal through a movement of Detachment followed by a return 
that reveals itself in a Transfiguration. 3 In the prosaic language of a 
nascent post-Modern Western science of Psychology, 

‘In every conflict a dynamic opposition occurs, and in this opposition 
some elements transcend from one side to the other and vice versa. 
Through this reciprocal action ... a new condition is reached which was 
not a predictable outcome of the conflict.' 4 

Is this divine act of new creation performed likewise when the en¬ 
counter between Man and God achieves itself in a collision between two 
diverse human societies, and when the pair of equally barren psycho¬ 
logical reactions in the souls of the children of the assaulted society are 
the two that we have now learnt to know as Zealotism and Herodianism ? 
As we stand on the marge of the Pool of Bethcsda 5 and watch a savage 
Zealot seeking to save the sacred water from a dominant Gentile’s 
polluting touch by freezing it, while a ruthless Herodian is seeking 
simultaneously to secure the same ritual satisfaction by draining the 
precious water away, our eyes turn towards the surrounding porches to 
gaze pityingly upon that ‘great multitude of impotent folk—of blind, 
halt, withered’—whom we see lying there ‘waiting for the moving of the 
water’. 

The Zealot’s and the Herodian’s feelings remain stonily unmoved by 
this spectacle of their afflicted fellow human beings’ piteous plight and 
sore need for healing. These two rival self-appointed champions of 
Jewry arc both so inhumanly intent on the waging of their cultural war 
with Hellenism in accordance with their respective tactics that, in the 
service of an alleged military necessity, they neither of them feel any 
compunction as they deprive their own forefather Abraham’s suffering 
children of their last ebbing hope of salvation. Will this unmerciful pair 
of pedants succeed, between them, in consummating their futile atrocity 
before the season arrives for the angel to go down into the pool and 
trouble the water with the miraculously transfiguring effect, for the 
sufferer who then first steps in, of making him whole of whatsoever 
disease he has had ? No answer to our question is to be expected from 
combatants in a cultural war who are totally preoccupied with the con¬ 
duct of their Lilliputian hostilities; but, above the un-Homeric hubbub 

> See IV. iv. 133. * See V. v. 383-9°- 

‘ Baynes, '^Cj.T^ythology of the Soul (London 19^0, Baillifre, Tindall & Cox; 
1949, Methuen), p. 32°- Compare the present Study, II. 1. 300-1. 

* John v. 2-9. 



626 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
of a Judaeo-Hellenic Battle of Frogs and Mice, let us hear also what 
Saint Paul saith : x 

‘Is He the God of the Jews only? Is He not also of the Gentiles? Yes, 
of the Gentiles also;* for there is no difference between the Jew and the 
Greek; for the same Lord over all is rich unto all that call upon Him. 3 
For by one spirit are we all baptised into one body, whether we be Jews 
or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free.* There is neither Jew nor Greek, 
there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female; for ye 
arc all one in Christ Jesus 5 —where there is neither Greek nor Jew, 
circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free; 
but Christ is all and in all.’ 6 

The blessing vouchsafed to Saint Paul and his fellow evangelists is: 

‘He that shall lose his life for My sake and the Gospel’s, the same shall 
save it.’ 7 

In Paul, Judaism did lose its life in so far as, for some two hundred years 
and more before Paul’s day, Judaism had been living for the ideal of 
preserving its own ancestral Syriac way of life against penetration by the 
masterfully intrusive alien culture of Hellenism. Paul was born and 
brought up in a Gentile Tarsus as a Pharisee—a cultural ‘isolationist’ 8 — 
and at the same time and place he received a Greek education and found 
himself a Roman citizen. The Zealot and the Herodian path thus both 
lay open in front of him, and as a young man he opted for Zealotism. 


« In the Tmian evangelist’s heavenly Christian strains we can catch echoes of the 
lovely pagan music of a Mantuan poet who, like Paul, had been a Roman citizen. Paul’s 
discernment that ‘there is no difference between the Jew and die Greek’ had been 
anticipated, almost phrase for phrase and rhythm for rhythm, in a Virgilian Dido’s 
Trot Tyriiuque mihi nullo discrimine agelur (Aeneid, Book I, 1. 574), while Aeneas’ 
Paribus se legibus ambaej inviclae gtntes aelema infoedera miltant (Aeneid, Book XII, 11 . 
190-1) foreshadows Paul’s 'By one spirit are we all baptised into one body, whether we 
be Jews or Gentiles’. Virgil's poem is, in truth, the pagan gospel of the cult of an Oecu¬ 
menical Collective Humanity—Mankind incorporated into one universal body politic 
under the aegis of a Dea Roma nnd under the auspices of a Divus Caesar—and it was no 
accident that a spiritual war to the death with this noblest of all avatars of the most vicious 
of all forms of idolatry should have been the earliest ordeal of an infant Christian Church. 

With an eye to the particular theme of the present chapter of this Study, we may notice, 
in passing, that Virgil was aware of the spiritual truth that a declaration of the common 
bankruptcy of Herodianism and Zealotism is, in the same breath, the revelation of a 
saving middle way. When the inevitable detection of Coroebus’s Herodian ruse of 
putting on the armour of a slain and despoiled antagonist has been followed by the 
slaying of Coroebus himself and those other comrades of Aeneas who have followed 
Corocbus's example ( Aeneid , Book II, 11. 424-9), the mythical Dardanian prototype of a 
mundane Roman saviour of Society is restrained, by the intervention of the Gods, from 
acting on a suicidal impulse to find his alternative to an Herodian's abortive stratagem 
in a Zealot’s heroic death. When the epiphany of Venus has been frustrated by the obsti¬ 
nacy of Anchiscs, and the hero sprung from the union of the goddess nnd the mortal 
reverts, in desperation, to his Zealot watchword Moriamur el in media arma ruamus (I. 
353) in his cry Arma, viri.ferle arma : vocal lux ultima viclos ( 1 . 668), the Man of Des¬ 
tiny’s heart is lifted, at this critical moment, above an ephemeral battle by the sudden 
miracle of the child Iulus’s transfiguration (II. 681-4). The tongue of fire that sits upon 
Iulus’a head, and the khvarenak that plays about his locks and temples, arc Virgilian 
counterparts of the tongues of fire that crown the heads of Christ’s apostles on the Day 
of Pentecost (Acts ii. 3), nnd of the sheen of Christ's own face and raiment in the mani¬ 
festation of His divinity on the mountain (Matt. xvii. 2; Mark ix. 3; Luke ix. 29). 

* Rom. iii. 29. a Rom. x. 12. * r Cor. xii. 13. 

1 Gal. iii. 28. ® Col. iii. ix. 

1 Mark viii. 33. Cp. Matt. x. 39 and xvi. 25; Luke ix. 24 and xvii. 33; John xii. 25. 

• See V. v. 73, n. 4. 



EVANGELISM 627 

But, when he was plucked out of this perverse initial Zealot course by his 
vision on the road from Jerusalem to Damascus, Paul did not then per¬ 
force become an Herodian. He did not then find himself confined to 
a choice between one or other of these two barrenly defensive and 
uncreative lines of action; there was revealed to him a creative way 
which transcended them both. 

Paul traversed the Roman Empire preaching neither Judaism versus 
Hellenism nor Hellenism versus Judaism, but a new way of life—Christ¬ 
ianity—which drew, without prejudice, upon the spiritual wealth of 
both those two contending cultures and offered itself, with an impartially 
benignant hospitality, to any member of cither of those two societies— 
or of any other civilization within the oecumenical theatre of the Evan- 

S list’s spiritual operations. No cultural frontier could stand in this 
ospcl’s way; for the Christian Church was not just a new society of 
the same species as the civilizations whose encounters with one another 
we have been investigating in the present Part of this Study; it was a 
society of a different species, distinguished by a new revelation of the 
nature of God and of the character of Man’s relation to Him. The crea¬ 
tively dramatic peripeteia , or ‘reversal of the situation’, which followed 
from the encounter between Jewry and Hellenism, was thus not achieved 
in any episode among the vicissitudes of alternating victor)' and defeat 
in these two civilizations’ long-drawn-out duel; it was manifested in the 
transcending of both these civilizations by a newly revealed higher reli¬ 
gion that had made its epiphany ‘above the battle’ which Judaism and 
Hellenism were fighting with one another. 

At the date at which these present words were being written, the 
Syriac and the Hellenic Civilization alike had long since passed out of 
existence, and even the Jewish relic of the Syriac Society was extant 
only in the shape of a social fossil; but the Christian Church, born of a 
creative response to the challenge which the encounter between those 
two now extinct civilizations had once presented to their children, was 
then still the outstanding spiritual force in the oecumenical mission-field 
of a Westernizing Latter-day World; and, in the light of the first nine¬ 
teen centuries of Christianity’s earthly pilgrimage, a twentieth-century 
historian might venture to predict that Christianity’s transfiguring effect 
on the World up to date would be outshone by its continuing operation 
in the future. 

A Christian-bred historian, however, would be a traitor to the genius 
of his ancestral faith if, in allowing himself to think this serenely sanguine 
thought, he were also to allow the abominable and desolating idol of a 
corporately worshipped Self to resume possession of his soul in the 
sacrilegious guise of a chauvinism on behalf of one finite revelation of 
God’s infinite light, merely because the Judaeo-Hellcnic facet of a terres¬ 
trial lamp’s dark glass 1 happened, as a fortuitous consequence of his 
time and place of birth, to be more familiar to him personally than 
Christianity’s Indo-Hellenic counterpart. To guard against the sin of 
both heart and head that a Christian would be committing most griev¬ 
ously against God’s Divine Majesty, provoking most justly God’s wrath 

1 1 Cor. xiii. 12. 



628 AFTERMATHS OF SUCCESSFUL ASSAULTS 
and indignation' against the sinner, if he should refuse to honour any 
manifestation whatsoever of the one and indivisible Divine Light, the 
Christian-bred student of God’s dealings with Man will remind himself 
that a post-Alexandrinc Hellenism, after forcing an entry into a Hittitc, 
an Egyptiac, and a Babylonic, as well as a Syriac, World in the fourth 
century b.c., had proceeded, in the second century b.c., to push its way 
into an Indie World likewise, and that, out of this Indo-Hcllcnic en¬ 
counter, a higher religion akin to Christianity had made its epiphany. 

The MahSyina transfigured the self-regardingly Self-dispelling asktsis 
of the Hinayanian arhat into the unselfishly Self-detaining evangelism 
of the Mahayanian bodhisattva. 1 2 A philosophy that had offered the 
spiritual athlete (on condition of his proving able to stay the arduous 
course) his salvation through the achievement of a complete detachment 
from both himself and his fellow living creatures, was transformed into 
a religion whose ideal figure was not the sage attaining Nirvana for him¬ 
self but the saviour of his fellows who, for their sakes, had made the 
supreme personal sacrifice, not of suffering the pains of a voluntarily 
accepted death, but of enduring the pains of a voluntarily protracted 
existence, in order to guide the feet of others into the way of peace 3 at 
the price of postponing, in saecula saeculorum, this Buddha-Saint’s own 
entry into his hard-won rest. 4 

At the time of writing, half-way through the twentieth century of the 
Christian Era, Christianity and the Mahayana were the two great living 
witnesses 5 to the spiritual significance of the social phenomenon of en¬ 
counters between civilizations—a phenomenon that had been recurring 
with an ever greater frequency and at an ever higher potency since the 
species of societies called civilizations had made its first appearance 
some five or six thousand years ago. Humanly speaking, it was a creative 
response to the challenge of one of these encounters that had brought 
to birth Christianity and the Mahayana and Islam and Hinduism. 

In an age in which the entire habitable and traversable face of the 
planet had been roped in by far-reaching Western hands to constitute 
thenceforth a single common arena, common exercise-ground, and, per¬ 
haps one day, common home for a united human family, it might be 
predicted that, in the next chapter of a henceforth oecumenical human 
history, the four higher religions sprung from the ruins of civilizations 
of the second generation were destined to have an intimate spiritual 
encounter with one another; and, whatever the outcome of this great 
imminent spiritual event might prove to be, it was evidently likely to 
inaugurate a new era in human life in This World. 

The goal of Man’s spiritual endeavours in an unborn age beyond the 
historian’s horizon might be divined by an understanding heart 6 from 
a reading 7 of the words that the Tarsian Jewish apostle of Christianity 

1 The General Confession in the Order of the Administration of the Lord's Supper, 

or Holy Communion, in the Book of Common Prayer according to the Use of the Church 
of England. 

* Sec V. v. 133-6 and 552; V. vi. 148 and 164, n. 3; and XII. ix. 632-3. 

» Luke i. 79 - * Psalm xcv. 11. 

5 See V. v. 370-2. _ 4 1 Kings iii. 9. 

7 Matt. xxiv. 15; Mark xiii. 14. 



EVANGELISM 629 

in partibus Gentilium is reported to have uttered in an impromptu 
address 1 to an Athenian audience on the Areopagus. 

'God that made the World and all things therein .. . hath made of one 
blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the Earth, and hath 
determined the times before appointed, and the bounds of their habitation, 
that they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after Him and find 
Him—though He be not far from every one of us; for in Him we live and 
move and have our being, as certain also of your own poets have said: 1 
“For we are also his offspring’’.’ 

1 Acts xvii. 22-31. 

1 Aratus’s Phatnomena, 1. 5, echoed in Clcanthcs’ Hymn to Zeus, 1. 4 (see V. vi. u, 
n. 2).—A.J.T. 



VIII. C, ANNEX 

THE TEMPORARY HALT OF THE 
WESTERN CIVILIZATION’S FRONTIER 
IN NORTH AMERICA AT THE EDGE OF 
THE GREAT PLAINS 

The occupation of North America by a Western Civilization which had 
originated on the other side of the Atlantic had been one of the greatest 
feats of expansion known to History down to the time of writing. This 
gigantic enterprise had been carried out within a period of less than four 
hundred years, reckoning from a . d . 1519, the year in which Cortes and 
his companions had made, in Mexico, the first permanent lodgement 
of West European invaders on Continental North American ground, 
to a . d . 1890, the year in which the internal frontier of agricultural 
settlement within the expanded political boundaries of the United States 
had been wiped out by the completion of the effective occupation and 
settlement of the whole national territory. Within those 371 years the 
whole of North America had in fact been occupied up to its natural 
frontiers—the Pacific coast and the southern edge of the Esquimaux’ 
preserve in the Arctic Zone 1 —by conquerors and colonists who had 
landed at divers points on the Atlantic coast from a . d . 1519 onwards. 

The magnitude of this achievement of the pioneers of the Western 
Civilization in North America may be measured bv comparing it with 
the same civilization’s previous expansion in the Old World. Starting 
from its original patrimony—those derelict western provinces of the 
Roman Empire in which the North European and Eurasian barbarian 
invaders had been converted to Latin Christianity without being sub¬ 
sequently conquered either by the Arab Caliphate or by the East Roman 
Empire—the Western Civilization, during its Dark Ages and Middle 
Ages, had taken more than six hundred years, reckoning from the open¬ 
ing of Charlemagne’s counter-offensive against the pagan Saxons in 
a.d. 772 to the conversion of the pagan Lithuanians to Latin Christian¬ 
ity in a.d. 1386, to occupy the northern zone of Western Europe from 
the northern fringes of the Rhine Basin and the Upper Danube Basin up 
to the southern fringe of the Arctic Zone. Before that, the Hellenic 
Civilization’s occupation of Western Europe, from the Appennines up 
to a natural frontier provided by the shores of the Atlantic and an 
artificial limes drawn along the Rhine-Danube river line, 2 had taken a 
quarter of a millennium, reckoning from the beginning of the Roman 
advance into the Po Basin after the close of the First Romano-Punic 
War in 241 b.c. down to Augustus’s decision, after the Roman military 
disasters of a.d. 6-9 at the hands of the Pannonians and the Cherusci, 
to abandon his attempt to carry the frontier forward to the line of the 
Elbe. In this post-Alexandrine Hellenic and in the subsequent Medieval 
Western expansion of a civilization into European territory previously 
* Sec III. Ui. 4-7. 

1 See 'The Rhine-Danube Frontier of the Roman Empire’, in V. v. 591-5. 



THE CHALLENGE OF THE GREAT PLAINS 631 
occupied by barbarians or by primitive peoples, the area occupied had in 
either case been trifling by comparison with the area in North America, 
within the natural frontiers indicated above, that was occupied by the 
Western Civilization between a.d. 1519 and a.d. 1890. 

Moreover, the major part of this Western achievement in North 
America that was consummated in a.d. 1890 had been accomplished 
within the last 127 years out of the total span of 371 by the people of 
the United States within the middle transcontinental zone of North 
America over which the United States’ political domain had expanded. 
The eventual area of the Continental United States west of the Appa¬ 
lachian and Alleghany Mountains had been occupied and settled since 
the end of the Seven Years War (gerebatur a.d. 1756-63). 

The American people’s spectacular contribution to the total result 
was, of course, matched, and was also, no doubt, at least partly ac¬ 
counted for, by the unusual advantages which the United States had 
enjoyed during this expansive period. She had, in fact, succeeded in 
having the best of both worlds for a hundred years and more. She had 
managed to remain economically 'in’ the Old World after having ex¬ 
tricated herself from being politically ‘of’ it. 

Between a.d. 1763 and a.d. 1820 the whole of North America had 
been liberated from European political entanglements as a result of the 
elimination of French rule from Canada and the Mississippi Basin in the 
Seven Years War (gerebatur a.d. 1756-63), the elimination of British 
rule from the Thirteen Colonies and Florida in the Revolutionary War 
(gerebatur a.d. 1775-83), the Louisiana Purchase completed in a.d. 1803, 
the acquisition of Florida from Spain by the United States in a.d. 1819, 
the liquidation of Spanish rule in Mexico in A.D. 1820, and, above all, 
Great Britain’s policy of drawing a cordon of sea-power round the Con¬ 
tinental European bases of the other Great Powers of the day. If the 
British Navy had not made it impracticable for Napoleon to take 
delivery of Louisiana after he had extorted from the Spanish Govern¬ 
ment a retrocession of the title deeds, President Jefferson would not have 
found the purchase so easy to negotiate. This British benefaction to the 
United States had been incidental and undesigned; but, after the close 
of the Anglo-American War of a.d. 1812-14 and the final overthrow of 
Napoleon at Waterloo, it had become a standing rule of British policy 
that Great Britain should keep clear of Continental European entangle¬ 
ments inside her naval cordon and should at the same time keep on good 
terms, outside it, with the United States, which, in the nineteenth 
century, was the only naval Power in the World that could have threat¬ 
ened Great Britain’s strategic position from the rear; and in these 
circumstances the maintenance of Canada’s political association with the 
United Kingdom had not, during the century ending in a.d. 19x4, 
threatened to entangle North America in European conflicts. 

Meanwhile, during the same century ending in A.D. 1914, a United 
States who had thus escaped from European political entanglements 
had been able still to draw on European economic resources—both on 
European population in the shape of immigrants and on European 
capital in the shape of loans transferred through the importation of 



6 3 z HEROIC AGES 

European manufactures—to assist her in pushing forward her western 
frontier of effective occupation and settlement from the line of the 
Appalachians and the Allcghanies, along which it had run in A.D. 1763, 
right across North America to the Pacific Coast within little more than 
125 years. During the same period the effectiveness of Western eco¬ 
nomic resources—whether imported from Europe or produced in North 
America itself—had been vastly enhanced by the Industrial Revolution 
in Technolog)', which had given Western Man an unprecedented com¬ 
mand over the rest of terrestrial creation, human and non-human alike. 

In these nineteenth-century circumstances the conquest of North 
America by the people of the United States, impressive though it had 
been, could not be regarded as an inexplicable miracle. The remarkable 
feature in the story was not that the American people should have won 
the West, but that their puissant westward advance should have been 
checked, even temporarily, by any section of the pre-Columbian popula¬ 
tion of North America whose habitat had lain athwart the pioneers’ 
path. The distinction of having made this exceptional and remarkable 
stand belonged to the Plains Indians. 

'The Plains Indians constituted for a much longer time than we realise 
the most effectual barrier ever set up by a native American popula¬ 
tion against European invaders in a temperate zone. For two and a half 
centuries they maintained themselves with great fortitude against the 
Spanish, English, French, Mexican, Texan, and American invaders, with¬ 
standing missionaries, whisky, disease, gunpowder, and lead.’ 1 

It was not, perhaps, so surprising that the Plains Indians should have 
maintained themselves from a.d. 1535 to a.d. 1848 against the Spaniards 
and their Mexican successors; for, apart from the notable invention of 
firearms, the equipment of Early Modern Western Man—particularly in 
means of transportation, which were of vital importance on the Great 
Plains—was not more efficient than the equipment of the Romans had 
been; and the epigoni of the Spanish conquerors of Mexico were more 
backward in their technology than most of their contemporaries in other 
parts of an expanded Western World. 2 It was more noteworthy that for 
more than fifty years—from about a.d. 1821 till the eighteen-seventies— 
the eastern edge of the Great Plains should have set a limit to the west¬ 
ward advance of the agricultural frontier of the United States. 

Between a.d. 1763, when French rule had been eliminated from the 
Mississippi Basin, and a.d. 1821, when Missouri had been admitted to 
statehood in the United States, the westward-flowing tide of American 
agricultural settlement, when once it had gathered sufficient head to 
force its way over the barrier of the Appalachian Mountains, had found 
no halting place at the line of the River Mississippi, which had been the 
western political frontier of the United States for the first twenty years 
(a.d. 1783-1803) after the end of the Revolutionary War. The Missis¬ 
sippi, like the Rhine and the Danube, had indeed been designed by 
Nature to serve human purposes not as a limes but as an artery of inland 

* Webb, W. P.: The Great Plaim (New York 1911, Ginn), p. 48. The quotations from 
this book have been made with the permission of the author and the publishers. 

1 See the example noticed in III. iii. 136, n. x. 



THE CHALLENGE OF THE GREAT PLAINS 633 
water communications, and the advancing host of migrant farmers had 
taken the passage of the great river in its stride. 1 Missouri had been 
settled between a . d . 1815 and a . d . 1819, and the town of Independence, 
near the north-western corner of the new state, had been founded in 
a . d . 1827.* At the western boundary of Missouri, however, the pioneers 
of an agricultural civilization had reached a limit that, in contrast to the 
Western Waters which had floated them on their way by providing them 
with a ready-made means of transportation, proved to be a really for¬ 
midable obstacle to their farther westward progress. They had reached 
the end of the timbered country and the beginning of a treeless steppe ; 3 
and at this line their advance was checked. 

During the half-century following the year a.d. 1821, in which Mis¬ 
souri was admitted to statehood, the American farmers and planters 
completed their occupation of the timbered country in the Mississippi 
Basin by bringing under cultivation Arkansas, Eastern Texas, Wiscon¬ 
sin, and Eastern Minnesota; and within the same period they also 
brought under cultivation the Great Eastern Bay of the treeless prairie, 
which penetrated the timbered country in a salient extending eastwards 
across Iowa and over the greater part of Illinois. 4 During the second 
half of the period they began to nibble at the fringe of the Great Plains 
themselves in Kansas; but the American pioneers on the Great Plains 
were not the farmers; they were the cattlemen who made their first drive 
northward from the south-western corner of Texas to the Missourian 
section of the borderline between woodland and prairie in a.d. i 866 ; 5 it 
was not till the eighteen-seventies that the American farmers began to 
conquer the Great Plains for the plough on the grand scale; the resis¬ 
tance of the Plains Indians was not completely overcome till a.d. 1876; 
and in that year Chief Sitting Bull’s war-band of Sioux, hardly more 
than four months before their surrender on the 31st October, inflicted 
on the United States Army the most severe reverse that it ever suffered 
at Indian hands when, on the 25th June, they wiped out Custer’s attack¬ 
ing force of 265 men. 6 

What is the explanation of these exceptional powers of resistance— 
displayed by the Great Plains and their pre-Columbian human occupants 
—to which the history of the United States as well as Mexico bears 
witness ? The prime cause is to be found in the physical intractability 
of the terrain itself to cultivation by a sedentary' society not yet equipped 
with the appropriate tools that were eventually to be forged by a Late 

' See Paxson, F. L.: History of the American Frontier, 1763-1S93 (Boston 1924, 
Houghton Mifflin), chaps. 21-24. The quotations from this book have been made with 
the permission of the publishers. 

* Sec Billington, R. A.: Westward Expansion, A History of the American Frontier 
(New York 1949, Macmillan), pp. 467 and 468. 

J See the map in Webb, op. at., between pp. 4 and 5. 

* This salient of the North American prairie was a counterpart of the Great Western 
Bay of the Eurasian Steppe—extending, between the southern limit of the Russian 
forests and the north shore of the Black Sea, up to the eastern foothills of the Carpathians 
—which a southward-flowing tide of Russian peasant pioneers had been bringing under 
cultivation since A.D. 1774, simultaneously with the American farmers’ and planters’ 
westward advance up to the eastern edge of the timberless zone of North America. 

» See further pp. 648-9, below. 

6 See Billington, R. A.: Westscard Expansion, A History of the American Frontier 
(New York 1949, Macmillan), p. 666. 



634 HEROIC AGES 

Modern Western Industrial Revolution; and a secondary’ cause is to be 
found in the mistakes committed by the pioneers of the Western Civiliza¬ 
tion in dealing with the Plains Indians after these pioneers had made 
their first contacts with them. West European Man in North America 
duly repeated the classical mistake, examined in the Part of this Study 
to which the present Annex attaches, which, on other frontiers between 
a civilization and barbarians, had eventually given the barbarians the 
victory; and it is not inconceivable that History might have followed the 
same course in North America as in the Old World if the southern edge 
of the Great Plains, where these impinged on Mexico, had not been 
forcibly taken over from Mexico by the United States in a.d. i 846-48 1 
and if thereafter the conquest of the Great Plains for agriculture had not 
been made possible for the American farmer by the invention and mass- 
production of new-fangled tools for dealing with unprecedented agri¬ 
cultural problems. 

In a pre-industrial age of Western history the settlement and cultiva¬ 
tion of the Great Plains by Spanish encomienderos with their Mexican 
peons or by planters from the South-Eastern United States with their 
Negro slaves or by farmers from the North-Eastern United States with 
their own hands was precluded by the absence of timber and the dearth 
of water near the surface. The Spanish explorers who reconnoitred the 
Great Plains from both the south-west and the south-east in a.d. 1535- 
41, and at least two American explorers who reconnoitred them in the 
second decade of the nineteenth century, were unanimous in declaring 
that this country was an irreclaimable desert. Hugh M. Brackenridge, 
in his Journal of a Voyage up the River Missouri, published in a.d. 1816, 
wrote that, from a point six hundred miles above the debouchure of the 
Missouri into the Mississippi, the country' 

‘becomes more dreary and desert till it reaches the Rocky Mountains, and 
can never have any other inhabitants than the few that may exist at certain 
stations along the river. ... It combines within its frightful and extensive 
territory the Steppes of Tartary and the moving sands of the African 
deserts.’* 

Thereafter Major Stephen H. Long, in his report on an expedition 
into the Plains that he had made in a.d. 1820, committed himself to the 
statement that, 

‘In regard to this extensive section of country, I do not hesitate in 
giving the opinion that it is almost wholly unfit for cultivation, and of 
course uninhabitable by a people depending on agriculture for their 
subsistence.’* 

A twentieth-century American historian comments that ‘Major Long 
not only failed to unlock the secrets of the Far West; he set up a psycho- 

• In thus annexing from Mexico the southern extremity of the Great Plains, which 
had been under Mexican sovereignty de jure but not de facto, the United States was 
doing for Mexico the same unintended and unwelcome yet nonetheless valuable service 
that Russia did for Persia when she conquered and annexed Transcospia and Trans- 
oxar.ia between a.d. 1863 and a.d. «8S6. While Russia thereby relieved Persia from raids 
by Turkmens and Uzbegs, the United States relieved Mexico from raids by Comanches 
and Apaches. 

1 Quoted by Paxson in op. cit., p. 216. 



THE CHALLENGE OF THE GREAT PLAINS 635 
logical barrier that kept others from disproving his falsehoods’. 1 ‘The 
tradition of the Great American Desert was at its height in the decade 
between 1850 and i860.’ 2 ‘Until after the Civil War the impression 
persisted that the farming frontier could never invade that inhospitable 
region.’ 3 Yet, as a later passage in Billington’s book testifies, Bracken- 
ridge’s and Long’s appreciation of the Great Plains was not incorrect 
in the technological circumstances of the time at which it was made. It 
was falsified only when the technique of the Industrial Revolution was 
brought to the baffled farmers’ assistance. 

'The Plains were opened to pioneers during the eighteen-seventies not 
by adventurous trailblazcrs but by inventors toiling over drafting boards, 
labourers sweating over whirring machines, and production managers 
struggling with the complexities of assembly-lines; for those were the 
men who applied the techniques of the Industrial Revolution to the unique 
problems of America’s last frontier. Their success made expansion 
possible.’* 

The inventions that eventually conquered the Great Plains for the 
plough were the railroad, barbed wire for fencing in a treeless land¬ 
scape, machinery for drilling deep wells instead of digging shallow 
wells, windmills for raising water from these deep wells automatically in¬ 
stead of by human muscle-power, and ingenious and complicated new 
agricultural implements. 5 

‘The Industrial Revolution freed American farmers from Time- 
shackles which had bound them since land was first tilled.’ 6 


And the tale of this technological triumph is recapitulated in a compari¬ 
son between two sets of figures. 

‘407,000,000 acres were occupied and 189,000,000 improved between a.d. 
1607 and a.d. 1870; 430,000,000 acres peopled and 225,000,000 placed 
under cultivation between a.d. 1870 and a.d. 1900.’ 7 


Meanwhile, between a.d. 1519 and the eighteen-sixties, the pioneers 
of the Western Civilization in North America who had reached the edge 
of the Great Plains had made, as has been noted already, a classical 
mistake which, in the Old World, had repeatedly enabled barbarians to 
turn the tables on their assailants; and the same mistake had been com¬ 
mitted by the Spanish Government in Mexico and by the United States 
Government in turn. This mistake had been to allow themselves, when 
once they had given provocation to neighbouring primitive societies by 
starting an aggressive advance into their country, to be deterred, upon 
reaching the edge of an apparently forbidding tract of terrain , 8 from 
proceeding with their occupation, in the teeth of this local obstacle, 
until their advance had brought them to a natural frontier with no 
potential transfrontier barbarians beyond it. In the Old World such 
rashly unsustained and inconclusive advances into the domains of the 

1 Billington, op. cit., pp. 452-3. 

1 Webb, op. cit., p, 159. Cp. pp. 147 152-160. 

J Billington, op. at, p. 413. * Ibid., p. 688. Cp. Webb, op. cit., p. 141. 

5 See Billington, op. cit., chap. 34; Webb, op. cit., chaps. 7 and 8. 


6 Billington, op. cit, p. 695. 

7 Ibid., p. 703. 


* See p. 36, n. 1, above- 



6 3 6 


HEROIC AGES 


primitive societies had been apt to cost a half-heartedly aggressive 
civilization dear. The more catastrophic of the two alternative possible 
consequences had been the prompt precipitation of an avalanche of 
barbarian counter-invasion; 1 the less immediately disastrous alternative 
had been the establishment of an artificial limes along the outer edge of 
the intractable terrain ; but in the long run this alternative had been no 
less fatal than the other, since the fundamental ‘law’ of the limes had 
proved to be that the passage of Time tells in the barbarians’ favour. 
This ‘law’ duly asserted itself in North America when Spain and the 
United States made successive attempts to establish a permanent artificial 
limes along the edge of the Great Plains. 

The policy of drawing a would-be permanent artificial times at the 
edge of the Great Plains was inaugurated by the Spaniards after a series 
of four discouraging reconnaissances from Mexico and Florida into the 
heart of North America 2 within the six years a.d. 1535-41. 3 One of the 
liabilities of the Mcxic Civilization which its Spanish conquerors had 
taken over perforce was a chronic feud between the warlike hunting 
tribes on the Plains and the northernmost outposts of a pre-Columbian 
sedentary agricultural society. 4 In a.d. 1593, little more than half a cen¬ 
tury after the Spaniards’ first encounters with the Plains Indians, they 
suffered their first serious reverse at their hands. 5 The policy of peaceful 

S ietration and conversion through the activities of Roman Catholic 
ristian missionaries, feebly supported by military force, which proved 
successful in dealing both with the sedentary agricultural pueblos in 
New Mexico 6 and with the primitive food-gathering tribes in California, 
was of no avail with the Plains Indians. A mission planted on the San 
Saba River, in the Apache country, in a.d. 1757 was wiped out by the 
Apaches in a.d. 1758. 7 

The Spanish authorities’ reaction to this disaster was to adopt, in a.d. 
1772, a recommendation, made by the Marquess de Rub! after an 
official inspection of the frontier zone in a.d. 1766-7, that, in order to 
set limits to the raids of the Plains Indians into New Spain, a limes, in 
the form of a chain of fifteen forts, should be drawn from coast to coast 
along a line which—everywhere except in its easternmost sector, where 
it was drawn through San Antonio, Texas, to Bahia del Espiritu Santo 
on the shore of the Gulf of Mexico—ran to the south-west of the Rio 
Grande, well within the future frontier between Mexico and the United 
States that was to be established by the peace settlement of a.d. 1848 
and the Gadsden Purchase of a . d . 1853.® When this Augustan policy 


* See p. 12, above. Instances of this historical phenomenon have been noted in V. 
v. 209, n. 3. 

2 Brief accounts of the expeditions of Cabeza de Vaca, Marcos de Niza, Coronado, 
and dc Soto will be found in Webb, op. cit., pp. 95-114. 

J These four Spanish incursions overland, like the five Norse incursions from Green¬ 
land into the north-eastern fringes of Continental North America (see II. ii. 292-3), 
were all made on the morrow of the original settlement and were never thereafter 
followed up. The Norse incursions were all made within forty years of the Norse 
colonization of Greenland in A.D. 985-fi, the Spanish incursions all within twenty-two 
years of Cortes’ landing in Mexico in a.d. 1519. 

4 Sec Webb, op. cit., p. 120. s See ibid., p. hi. 



THE CHALLENGE OF THE GREAT PLAINS 637 
likewise proved a failure, the Spanish authorities in a.d. 1777-8 planned, 
but never carried out, an assault upon the Apaches, with the assist¬ 
ance of the Comanches, on the lines of Marcus Aurelius’s attempt— 
abandoned after his death by Commodus—to subjugate, and incorporate 
into the Roman Empire, the domains of the Quadi and Marcomanni 
beyond the Augustan limes along the middle course of the Danube. 1 

'One would judge that, with experience, the task of conquest and 
occupation would grow lighter; but, on the contrary, it became heavier, 
and eventually impossible. . . . 2 

‘As late as a.d. 1842, George W. Kendall, a member of the Santa F6 
expedition, records that, as far south as Durango, the miserable in¬ 
habitants remained within their walled towns out of fear of the raiding 
Apaches. At the end of the Spanish regime the Plains Indians were more 
powerful, far richer, and in control of more territory than they were at 
the beginning of it. The problem of subduing them had to be solved by 
another race.’ 1 

Indeed, in the light of the usual denouement in the histories of anti- 
barbarian limites, it does not seem fanciful to imagine that, if the United 
States had not forcibly taken the problem out of Mexican hands in A.D. 
1846-8, the year a.d. 1952 might have seen Mexico being ruled by the 
descendants of Apache and Comanche barbarian conquistadores , since 
it is hard to discern any indigenous social force within Mexico itself 
which would have been powerful enough to keep these now formidable 
transfronticr barbarians at bay after the fall, in a.d. 1820, of a Spanish 
Viccroyalty of New Spain that had provided the Mexic World with its 
universal state. 

How was it that, in the course of the three centuries of Spanish rule 
over the Mexic World, the Plains Indians had become a serious danger 
to the sedentary society whose domain adjoined the southern edge of 
theirs, instead of remaining the mere nuisance to the north-westernmost 
Mexic agricultural pueblos that they had been before the Spaniards’ 
advent ? The answer to this question is that these barbarians in this one 
section of North America had rendered themselves formidable by the 
means by which so many of their counterparts in the Old World had 
made their fortunes. They had adopted one of the weapons introduced 
by their assailants and had adapted this weapon to their own terrain 
with a local efficiency which the wardens of the intrusive civilization’s 
times had proved unable to emulate. The Spanish authorities’ task on 
the frontier of the Mexic World over against the Great Plains had become 
‘eventually impossible owing to the fact that the Indians learned to use 
horses’; 4 and, in the chapter of the present Study to which this Annex 
attaches, 5 we have observed 6 that this was a repetition, in North America, 
of the Arab barbarian Nomads’ adoption of the same animate weapon, 
on the eve of the Primitive Muslim Arab conquests, from the civiliza¬ 
tions occupying the adjoining 'Fertile Crescent’; of the Berber bar¬ 
barian Nomads’ previous adoption of the camel from Arabia via Egypt; 
and of the Arya barbarian Nomads’ earlier adoption of the chariot from 

1 See V. v. 593. 1 Webb, op. cit., p. 98. 

* Ibid., p. 138. « Ibid., p. 98. 

* Sec pp. 15-19. above. 6 On pp. 17-18, above. 



638 HEROIC AGES 

the Sumeric World on the eve of their descent upon the Indus Basin 
and South-West Asia in the eighteenth or seventeenth century B.C. 

In order to appreciate the revolutionary increase in the Plains Indians’ 
power which was the consequence of their acquisition of the horse from 
Spanish trespassers on the southern fringe of their domain, it must be 
borne in mind that the Great Plains were a North American equivalent 
of the Great Eurasian Steppe. The North American prairie extended 
north-north-westwards, in the same general direction as the Rocky 
Mountains which bounded it on the west, from the north coast of the 
Gulf of Mexico, between the east bank of the Lower Rio Grande and 
the western limit of the timbered eastern half of Texas, right into the 
southern sections of what were eventually to be the two Canadian 
provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan; and this huge expanse of open 
grass-land shared with the Eurasian and Afrasian steppes the property 
of having a higher social ‘conductivity’ than any other physical medium 
of human intercourse except the Sea. Before the introduction of the 
horse, this conductivity of the prairie had made it possible for eleven 
Nomad hunting tribes' to make their living there, but at the same time 
the poverty of their prc-cquine equipment had set narrow limits to their 
exploitation of the prairie’s latent resources for human purposes. 

The Plains Indians might never have been able to make themselves 
at home on the Plains at all if, in a pre-Columbian Age, the conductivity 
of the Plains had not propagated two implements all over the Plains 
when once the diffusion of these implements had carried them to the 
Plains’ north-western edge. One of these instruments was a domesti¬ 
cated animal: the sled-dog, 2 presumably borrowed originally from the 
Esquimaux, which had provided the Plains Indians with a means of 
transportation. The other implement was the composite bow: s a potent 
weapon which had presumably come to the North American Plains from 
as far afield as the Great Eurasian Steppe, where it had been one of the 
characteristic weapons of the Eurasian Nomad herdsmen. The posses¬ 
sion of these two implements had enabled the eleven tribes to make a 
living on the Great Plains by hunting the two great herds of buffalo with 
which they shared this habitat; but, while the composite bow was an 
effective weapon for warfare as well as for hunting, the dog-sled, trans¬ 
ferred to a grass-surface from an ice-surface, was an inadequate means 
of transportation. In the horse, which spread over the Plains from the 
south-east as the sled-dog and the composite bow had spread over them 
from the north-west, 4 the Plains Indians suddenly acquired a means of 
transportation that was ideal for their habitat, and, in the act, they as 
suddenly became for the first time fully masters of the prairie for the 
twin purposes of hunting the buffalo and making war on their fellow men. 

‘The student of social origins and institutions would like to put his 
finger on the exact spot where the Spanish explorer’s horses (mares and 
stallions, for gelding was not then practised) broke their tethers and rushed 
away into the wild country. Perhaps the horses were stampeded by Indians 


« See the maps in Webb, op. cit., pp. so and 51. 

2 See Webb, op. cit., pp. 52 and 57. 

J Sec Billington, op. at., p. 410. * See Webb, op. cit., p. 57. 



THE CHALLENGE OF THE GREAT PLAINS 639 

or by herds of buffalo; but it is more than likely that some were set free 
because they became too poor or footsore or crippled to be of further use 
to their masters. It is not remarkable that horses escaped; but it is remark¬ 
able that they survived, multiplied, and spread over the region west of the 
Mississippi and Missouri rivers. Not only did they spread as beasts of 
burden for the Plains Indians, but they grew wild in vast herds, proving 
that they had found a natural home. It is generally accepted by anthropo¬ 
logists that these herds originated from the horses lost or abandoned by 
de Soto about A.D. 1 541. Whether they came from de Soto’s horses or from 
those of Coronado or from other explorers is not material; we know that 
the Kiowa and Missouri Indians were mounted by A.D. 1682; [the Kiowa- 
Apachc, by a.d. 1684;]' the Pawnee, by a.d. 1700; the Comanche by A.D. 
1714; the Plains Cree and Ankara by a.d. 1738; the Assiniboin, Crow, 
Mandan, Snake, and Teton, by a.d. 1742; and the most northern tribe, 
the Sarsi, by A.D. 1784.* 

‘It was indeed a momentous event when a Plains Indian, half afraid 
and uncertain, threw his leg for the first time across the back of a Spanish 
horse and found himself borne along over the grassy plain with an case 
and speed he had never dreamed possible of attaining.... From that time, 
slowly and by degrees, he worked out his technique. . . . His world was 
enlarged and beautified, and his courage, never lacking, expanded with 
his horizon and his power. God save his enemies!’* 

The Plains Indians’ Mexican enemies were saved by falling into the 
hands of the Americans instead of the Apaches. In the sweeping annexa¬ 
tions, made by the United States in a.d. 1848, of vast tracts of juridically 
Mexican territory in which Mexican sovereignty had been effective only 
at a few widely scattered points, the victorious aggressor Power was 
inadvertently taking over responsibility for an anti-barbarian frontier, 
along the southern edge of the Great Plains, which the Republic of 
Mexico’s predecessor, the Spanish Viceroyalty of New Spain, had in¬ 
herited, some three hundred years and more before that date, from the 
Aztec builders of a Mexic universal state whose work the Spaniards had 
completed. Meanwhile, on the eastern edge of the Great Plains, adjoin¬ 
ing the wooded eastern section of North America that had been effectively 
occupied by American planters and farmers, the United States had 
already committed itself to the very policy of establishing a permanent 
limes, over against the Plains Indians, which by this time had been dis¬ 
credited on the southern edge of the Plains by the failure of a corres¬ 
ponding Spanish experiment there ; 4 and, while this American repetition 
of a Spanish mistake was in train, Jefferson Davis capped de Soto’s or 
Coronado’s feat of presenting the Plains Indians with the horse that had 
once made the fortune of the Arabs by doing his best to endow them 
with the further gift of the camel, which had once made the fortune of 
the Berbers.* 


« Ibid., p. 117. . , 

* Ibid., pp. 56-57. . 1 Ibid., pp. X15-16. 

* Accounts of the United States Government a attempt to establish a permanent 
limes along the eastern edge of the Great Plains between A.D. 1823 and a. d. 1840, and 

of the breakdown <. 

op. cit., chaps. 31 _ 

W. C.: The American inuiun rrvnutr (i~uuu- »y*», m««n _ 

J A brief account of this entertaining incident will be found in Webb, op. cit, pp. 
199-200. 



640 HEROIC AGES 

Under the influence of the picture of the Plains as an inhospitable 
desert which had been given currency, in the course of the first two 
decades of the nineteenth century, in a series of reports by American 
explorers, culminating in Major Long’s report on his expedition in a.d. 
1820,* a proposal had been made in a.d. 1823 by John C. Calhoun, at 
that time Secretary of War at Washington, for permanently segregating, 
within the political domain of the United States, an area that was still 
to be left open for settlement by American farmers from an area that 
was henceforth to be reserved for occupation by the Indian peoples. 
The dividing line was to be drawn approximately at the ninety-fifth 
meridian, which coincided more or less with the borderline between the 
eastern woodlands and the western prairie. Indian peoples living east of 
this line—including ‘the five civilised nations’ in the South-Eastern 
United States—were to be induced or compelled to move to the west of 
the line in consideration of their being guaranteed the permanent 
possession of new lands there, while the Plains Indians were to be in¬ 
duced to make room for these Indian newcomers from the East in con¬ 
sideration of their being guaranteed the permanent occupation of the 
rest of their hunting-grounds west of the line. The security of title with 
which the Indians of both provenances were thus to be invested was to 
be the first step towards reclaiming them for Civilization. 

‘The great object to be accomplished,’ wrote President Monroe in 
recommending Calhoun’s proposal to Congress on the 27th January, 
1825, ‘is the removal of these tribes to the territory designated . . . con¬ 
veying to each tribe a good title to an adequate portion of land ... by 
providing ... a system of internal government . . . and, by the regular 
progress of improvement and civilisation, prevent . . . degeneracy.’ 2 

This proposal was duly carried out in the course of the next fifteen 
years. 

‘The approval of Congress was given. A group of treaties made with the 
western Indians in a.d. 1823 gave a sort pledge that was followed up 
by specific laws of 1828 and 1830, in which the policy of (Indian) colonisa¬ 
tion was described as an accepted thing. In a.d. 1832 Congress recognised 
its responsibility to the (Indian] emigrants and created a Bureau of Indian 
Affairs in the War Department, under a Commissioner whose duty was 
to care for the Indian wards. Two years later, the great charter of the 
frontier Indians was enacted in the Indian Intercourse Act, which for¬ 
bade any White person, without licence from the Indian Commissioner, 
to set foot in the Indian Country... . Schools were promised, to teach the 
Indians letters and trades. In some cases blacksmiths and other artisans 
were to be maintained by the United States. There was a serious attempt 
to carry out the suggestion that, once the tribes had been shifted to their 
final place of residence, they must be lifted to a higher scale of civiliza¬ 
tion by the Government of the United States-By the end of a.d. 1840 

most of the tribes had been removed to the frontier, the Indian Country 
was solid, and the administrative details of the arrangement were com¬ 
plete. The American citizen, by his own enactment, no longer possessed 
a right to advance his settlements towards the West.’ 3 


1 See pp. 634-5, above - 
* Paxson, op. cit., pp. 277-8 and 284. 


1 Quoted in Paxson, op. cit., p. 277. 



THE CHALLENGE OF THE GREAT PLAINS 641 

The military implications of this would-be permanent political settle¬ 
ment were clearly recognized. A chain of forts had been built along the 
western border of the area already settled by American farmers as early 
as a.d. 1816-27.* 

‘The Secretary of War in a.d. 1837 recommended "a chain of perma¬ 
nent fortresses ... and a competent organisation of the militia of the 
trontier states as the best means of maintaining the peace. . . . The 
commander of the army in the West, General E. P. Gaines, recommended 
in a.d. 1838 that the cordon of military posts along the Border be built of 
stone, to outlast the century at least. . . . [Actually,] while the Indian 
Irontier lasted, the defence of the frontier settlements was entrusted 
to moving bodies of United States troops, to a regiment of mounted 
dragoons that were enlisted early in the ’thirties, and to the militia.' 1 

This policy of freezing the western frontier of American agricultural 
settlement along the borderline between the woodlands and the prairie 
was maintained for more than thirty years. The first inroad upon it was 
made in a.d. 1851, when the Sioux and other Plains Indians were 
cajoled by the United States authorities into consenting, in negotiations 
conducted that summer at Fort Laramie, to a limitation of their ranges 
within the area that had previously been guaranteed to them as their 
permanent domain; J and 'in the summer of a.d. 1854 the first land 
office in the Indian Country was opened across the Border from Missouri, 
to retail to settlers the tribal lands that had been dedicated to perpetual 
Indian, use’/ Yet, ‘as late as a.d. 1853, the Commissioner of Indian 
Affairs’ had ‘reported that there was no serious encroachment of 
squatters upon the lands of his wards west of Iowa and Missouri’; s 
and the policy that had been inaugurated by the United States Secretary 
of War, J. C. Calhoun, in a.d. 1823 was still being pursued by one of his 
successors, Jefferson Davis, in a.d. 1853-7. 6 

The first premiss on which Davis founded his policy for the frontier 
was the assumption, traditional in the United States since the eighteen- 
twenties, that the Great Plains were irreclaimable. He referred to them 
as ‘that unpopulated desert... which, I believe, is, the most of it, to be 
unpopulated for ever'. 7 From this first premiss it followed that there 
could be no question of abandoning President Monroe’s policy of main¬ 
taining a permanent military frontier between the American planters’ 
and farmers’ country in the woodlands to the east of the hundredth 
meridian and the Indian hunting-tribes’ country on the prairie to the 
west of the same line. The technical military innovations which Davis 
advocated were all concerned merely with the location of the limes and 
the disposition, type, and equipment of the troops by whom it was to be 
held. He proposed to replace the existing chain of numerous small and 
scattered American military posts, thrown out into the fringe of a prairie 
on which the frontier of American agricultural settlement had not 
caught up with them, by a small number of strong garrisons that were 
to be located much farther to the rear, within the already settled and 


1 See ibid., pp. 2x3-14. 
3 See ibid., pp. 424-6* 

5 Ibid., p. 424. 

’ Quoted ii 


in Webb, op. cit., p. 198. 


* Ibid., pp. 284-5. 
4 Ibid., p. 426. 

* See Webb, 


op. cit., pp. 194-6* 



642 HEROIC AGES 

cultivated area. The forward zone, from which the existing posts were 
to be withdrawn, was to be dominated intermittently by sending out 
strong patrolling expeditions into it during the season when there would 
be grass there to provide fodder for cavalry horses and baggage animals. 

In recording Davis’ proposals, Webb points out' ‘that Davis was 
advocating a policy very similar to that proposed by Rubf in his report 
advocating a reorganisation of the Spanish policy on the southern 
border of the Great Plains’. A student of the frontier policy of the Roman 
Empire will discern in Davis’ proposal the familiar transition from 
an Augustan policy of holding a single continuous brittle forward line 
to a Diocletianic policy of defence in depth through a war of move¬ 
ment, with provision for more adequate reserves than the Augustan 
system had allowed. 1 The inference is that, by a date at which the 
United States’ limes along the eastern edge of the Great Plains had 
been in existence for some thirty years, the defence, here too, was 
beginning to be subjected to a strain through the operation of the ‘law’ 
that, on a stationary military frontier between a civilization and bar¬ 
barians, Time tells in the barbarians’ favour; and the increases in both 
the cost and the difficulty of maintaining the American limes were, in 
fact, the grounds explicitly put forward by Davis himself for the techni¬ 
cal changes that he was suggesting. He had found that the existing ‘garri¬ 
sons were small and weak, and the soldiers poorly paid and dispirited’. 3 
The inability of troops dispersed among numerous small forward posts 
‘to pursue and punish’ offending Indian war-bands, which had been 
committing depredations almost under their noses, had ‘tended to bring 
into disrepute the power and energy of the United States’. 4 

The truth was that, by the eighteen-fifties, the Plains Indians had 
made themselves into fighting men whose efficiency was formidable not 
merely for a Republic of Mexico, but even for a Power of the contem¬ 
porary calibre of the United States; for, in mounting the Spaniard’s 
horse, the Plains Indian had not left the Scythian's composite bow lying 
idle on the ground. He had converted himself not merely into an expert 
horseman but into an expert horse-archer in the Parthian style; and the 
horse-archer who had thus been reborn in the New World was more 
than a match for the dragoon from the West European extremity of the 
Old World whose weapon—a pair of horse-pistols—had given the most 
recent demonstration of its inefficiency at Waterloo. When, in the 
eighteen-twenties, the American pioneers in Eastern Texas came within 
close enough range of the western plains to provoke Comanche raids 
upon them, 

'in most respects the Indian had the best of it. In the first place the Texan 
carried at most three shots; the Comanche carried twoscore or more 
arrows. It took the Texan a minute to reload his weapon; the Indian could 
in that time ride three hundred yards and discharge twenty arrows. The 
Texan had to dismount in order to use his rifle effectively at all, and it was 
his most reliable weapon; the Indian remained mounted throughout the 
combat.’ 3 

> Webb, op. cit., p. 196, n. 1. 1 See pp. 26-28, above. 

s Webb, op. cit., p. 194. * Jefferson Davis, quoted ibid., p. 195. 

» Webb, op. cit., p. 169. Cp. Billington, op. cit., pp. 410 and 652. 



THE CHALLENGE OF THE GREAT PLAINS 643 

An officer of the United States Army, in a book published as late as 
a.d. 1866,' still found it necessary to explain to his readers that ‘the 
modern schools of military science are but illy suited to carrying on 
a warfare with the wild tribes of the Plains’ and that the horse-Indians’ 
‘tactics are such as to render the old system almost wholly impotent’. 

It is true that the Industrial Revolution, which was eventually to 
provide the American farmer with the appropriate tools for bringing 
the prairie under the plough, first came to the American soldier’s rescue 
by providing him with an appropriate weapon for fighting the prairie 
Indian horse-archer. The six-shooter revolver invented by Samuel Colt 
of Boston was in use among the Texan Rangers before a.d. 184c. 2 

‘The six-shooter . . . stands as the first mechanical adaptation made by 
'the American people when they emerged from the timber and met a set 
of new' needs in the open country of the Great Plains. It enabled the White 
Man to fight the Plains Indian on horseback.’ 1 

Yet the equipment of American cavalrymen with the revolver was not the 
end of the armaments race between the Plains Indian and the West 
European invaders of North America which had begun when the Indian 
had acquired the Spanish cavalryman’s horse; for the transfer of the 
military ascendancy from the Indian to the American horseman, which 
was the first effect of the advent of the revolver, was only temporary. 

‘The revolver . . . multiplied every soldier by six and produced such 
an inspiring moral effect on the troops, and so entirely depressing an 
effect on the Indians, that the fights became simply chases—the soldiers 
attacking, with perfect surety of success, ten or twenty times their num¬ 
bers. [But] after some years the Indians began to obtain and use revolvers, 
and the fighting became more equal. It remained, however, for the brccch- 
loading rifle and metallic cartridges to transform the Plains Indian from 
an insignificant, scarcely dangerous, adversary into as magnificent a sol¬ 
dier as the World can show. Already a perfect horseman, and accustomed 
all his life to the use of arms on horseback, all [that] he needed was an 
accurate weapon which could be easily and rapidly loaded while at full 
speed.’ 4 

This passage, recording the personal experience of an American 
officer who had himself seen active service on the Indian frontier in the 
last chapter of this frontier’s history, brings out the point that, down to 
the eve of the date at which the Plains Indians were crushed and cor¬ 
ralled once for all by their American adversaries, their military efficiency 
and prowess continued to increase in a geometrical progression through 
their practice of the transfrontier barbarians’ master-art of borrowing 
the enemy civilization’s weapons and then turning them to better account 
by adapting their use to the nature of a local terrain on which the bar¬ 
barian is at home while the pioneer of the intrusive civilization is out of 
his clement there. The book from which this passage has been quoted 
was published in a.d. 1882, some six years after the campaigning season 

* Matey, R. B.: Thirty Years of Army Life on the Border (New York 1866, Harper), 
pp. 67 ff.. quoted in Webb, op. cit., p. 196, n. 1. 

* See Webb, op. cit., p. 173. 1 Webb, op. cit., p. 179. 

« Dodge, Colonel R. f.: Our Wild Indians (Hartford, Conn. 1SS2, Worthington), pp. 
450-1, quoted in Webb, op. cit., p. 175, n. 2. 



644 HEROIC AGES 

of a.d. 1876, which had been signalized, in the annals of the warfare 
between the United States and the Sioux, both by the final debacle of 
this barbarian war-band and by its previous infliction on the United 
States Army of the most grievous reverse ever suffered by United States 
troops at Indian hands. 1 The explanation of Sitting Bull’s swan-song 
victory over Custer is made clear by Colonel Dodge : s 

‘That he [the American soldier] can still contend with the Indian on 
anything like equal terms is his highest commendation; for the Indian 
is his superior in every soldierlike quality except subordination to 
discipline and indomitable courage.’ 

If this verdict on the comparative military qualities of the United 
States Army and the Plains Indians in the eighteen-seventies is as just 
an appreciation as it would have been, supposing that it had been pro¬ 
nounced, apropos of the Roman Army and the Goths, by Ammianus 
Marcellinus, it does indeed go far towards explaining how it came to 
pass that in a.d. 1876 the United States Army suffered, in miniature, a 
disaster as deadly as the Roman catastrophe at Adrianople in a.d. 378; 
but we have then still to find the explanation of the extreme difference 
between the respective sequels to two episodes of military history that 
appear to run parallel up to this point. The victory of the Goths at 
Adrianople on the 9th August, 378, was the prelude to a sweeping bar¬ 
barian conquest of half the Roman Empire, whereas the victory of the 
Sioux on the Little Big Horn on the 25th June, 1876, was the prelude 
to a decisive collapse of the barbarian victors. 3 The explanation of this 
diversity in the outcome is not to be found simply in an industrialized 
Western Society’s fertility in spawning ever more lethal new-fangled 
mechanical weapons, considering that each new weapon of the kind was 
successively acquired, and turned to still better account on barbarian 
terrain, by the Western Civilization’s Indian opponents on the North 
American Great Plains. The ultimate reason why the transfrontier bar¬ 
barian who had triumphed over the Roman Empire in the Old World 
and had worsted the Spanish Empire and its Mexican successor-state in 
North America was eventually overwhelmed in North America by the 
United States was not because of the superiority of the American people 
in mechanical equipment but because of their numbers and, perhaps 
even more, their enterprise. 

Before the last round in the warfare between the Americans and the 
Plains Indians was fought out to a decisive conclusion in the Americans’ 
favour in the course of the years a.d. 1861-76, the Plains Indians had 
been outmanoeuvred in advance through being encircled by their 
American assailants, as the Eurasian Nomad herdsmen who were crushed 
by the Russians and the Manchus in the course of the eighteenth and 
nineteenth centuries of the Christian Era had previously been encircled 
by these two sedentary Powers when the Russian and Manchu outposts 
had collided with one another in the seventeenth century in the Amur 

1 See Billington, op. tit., p. 666. 3 Quoted in Webb, op. tit., p. 175, n. 2. 

J The details of the last convulsions of Indian resistance on the Plains between a.d. 
1876 and a.d. 1890 will be found in Billington, op. tit., pp. 666-7. The accompanying 
religious phenomena have been noticed in the present study in V. v. 329-32. 



THE CHALLENGE OF THE GREAT PLAINS 645 
Basin. 1 And, like the seventeenth-century Russo-Manchu feat of en¬ 
circling the Eurasian Nomads, the nineteenth-century American feat of 
encircling the North American Plains Indians was achieved with no 
better weapons than de Soto’s or Coronado’s, and with no better means 
of transportation than Alexander’s, Caesar’s, or Napoleon’s. 

Like the contemporary South African pioneers who were trekking 
northward across the Orange River into the heart of Africa, the American 
pioneers who traversed the Great Plains of North America in the course 
of the years a.d. 1821-49 were armed only with non-repeating fire-arms, 
and were equipped, at the best, with ‘covered wagons’ of the kind in 
which the Goths had made their transit from the Baltic to the Black Sea 
coast of the Eurasian Continent in the early centuries of the Christian 
Era, and the Philistines’ theirs from the Aegean coast of Anatolia to the 
eastern approaches to Egypt in the early years of the twelfth century 
B.c. Indeed, the nineteenth-century American pioneers reckoned it a 
triumph when they succeeded in finding a way for the passage of these 
immcmorially old ‘houses on wheels’ which not only made the journey 
physically practicable for children, women, sick persons, and household 
goods, as well as for able-bodied men, but also made it possible to protect 
the caravans against attack by Indians behind the rampart of a wagon- 
lager. 2 In some of the earliest of their treks across the Plains into the 
Far West, the American pioneers failed to manceuvre their wagons 
through the mountains and were compelled to finish the journey with 
pack-horses. In the summer of a.d. 1856 a party of five hundred men, 
women, and children actually made their way over the twelve hundred 
miles of trail from Iowa City to Salt Lake City pushing a hundred two¬ 
wheeled hand-cartsP 

The trans-Plains pioneers were no doubt eventually assisted in arriv¬ 
ing at their jumping-off places at the western edge of the eastern 
timbered country by the gradual development of mechanical transporta¬ 
tion, in the shape of river-steamships and railroads, in their rear. Yet the 
first sod was not turned for the construction of the Baltimore and Ohio 
Railroad till a.d. 1828, 4 seven years after the first wagon caravans had 
made their way across the Plains from Missouri to Santa F6; the Balti¬ 
more and Ohio Railroad did not reach the Ohio River till a.d. 1852; and 
‘it was five years more before there was a continuation west of the 
Ohio to Cincinnati and St. Louis’. 1 Thus the trans-Plains West had 
already been won by the pioneers before railhead had reached their 
jumping-off places on the western border of the State of Missouri at 
the eastern edge of the prairie. Work on a transcontinental railroad was 
not started till a.d. 1863—when, significantly, the first start was made 
at the Far Western end, from west to east, and not from cast to west at 
the westernmost railhead in the Mississippi Basin—and the through- 
track from coast to coast was not completed till May 1869, in the year 
following the campaigning season in which the United States Army had 
broken the back of the Plains Indians’ resistance. 

» See III. iii. 19. 2 See Billington, op. dt., pp. 463-4 «nd 5*5- 

» See ibid., pp. S43-3- „ ., 

* See Paxson, op. at., p. 404- * lbld -> P- 4®5- 



646 HEROIC AGES 

What was it that moved the American people, without waiting for the 
weapons and tools that the Industrial Revolution was forging for them, 
thus to encircle the Plains Indians by breaking out of the United States 
Government’s artificial limes along the western verge of the timbered 
country and pushing across the prairie and over the mountains to a 
natural frontier at the Pacific coast ? For half a century and more, run- 
ning from about a.d. 1820, the American people believed, as unquestion- 
ingly as the United States Government, that the Great Plains were 
permanently irreclaimable for agriculture. What prompted the people 
to reply to the challenge of this apparent barrier across their path by 
making a response that, unlike their Government’s response, was posi¬ 
tive, not negative? While the Government was trying to establish a per¬ 
manent military frontier along the eastern edge of the Plains, pioneer 
American traders, farmers, and miners were pushing their adventurous 
way right across the Plains in the hope of finding—not on them, but 
beyond them—a fresh land of promise which would equal, and perhaps 
surpass, the timbered eastern section of the United States which by this 
time they had already colonized. 

This daring leap of the American pioneers across the prairie in the 
nineteenth century of the Christian Era is reminiscent of the leap across 
the Great Western Bay of the Eurasian Steppe that was made in the 
tenth century by missionaries from the Oxus-Jaxartcs Basin who con¬ 
verted Great Bulgaria to Islam and by rival missionaries from Con¬ 
stantinople who converted Russia to Eastern Orthodox Christianity. 
But the driving force that gave an irresistible impetus to the American 
pioneers’ trek across two-thirds of the breadth of the great North 
American island from the western edge of the eastern timbered country 
all the way to the Pacific coast was not that concern for the salvation of 
souls which had previously carried the Jesuit missionaries to California 
from Mexico; it was the mounting pressure of an American population, 
cast of the times, that was now being reinforced by the rapidly increasing 
population of a nineteenth-century W estern Europe. 

'The whole population of the United States rose from 9.638,453 in 
a.d. 1820 to 17,069,453 in a.d. 1840. Of this increase of almost seven and 
a half millions, more than four millions were to be found in the states and 
territories west of the Appalachian Mountains. The total western popula¬ 
tion was about 6,300,000,... and this total was nearly 200 per cent more 
than it had been in a.d. 1820. The whole United States increased about 
80 per cent in twenty years. The eastern states, even with the help of 
their frontier elements, increased only some sixty per cent in the same 
period.’ 1 

The pressure of this potent head of population mounting up against the 
inner face of the United States Government’s times was the force that 
catapulted the pioneers—by sheer muscle-power without mechanical 
aids—right across the Plains to the western mountains, and, over these, 
to the Pacific, between the years a.d. 1821 and 1849. 

This abundance of man-power, working together with a contemporary 
release of the United States from political and military entanglements 
« Paxson, op. cit., pp. 286-7. 



THE CHALLENGE OF THE GREAT PLAINS 647 

overseas, perhaps suffices to explain the contrast between the Americans’ 
triumphant nineteenth-century response to the challenge of the Great 
Plains and the Spaniards’ previous dismal failure. Even after the 
Spaniards had established themselves in Texas, on the opposite fringe 
of the Great Plains to New Mexico, in a.d. 1716-18, 1 

‘if a Spaniard wanted to go from San Antonio [in Texas] to Santa Fd 
[in New Mexico], he did not make a direct journey across the Great 
Plains: he took the Camino Real, went south to Durango, then turned 
west and north and skirted the mountains until he came to Santa Fd. He 
went hundreds of miles out of the direct way, thus avoiding the open 
Plains country.’ 1 

In the event, a trail across the Great Plains to Santa Fd in New Mexico 
from the timbered eastern section of North America was opened up, 
not from Texas, but from Missouri. 

The news that Mexico had thrown off Spanish sovereignty in a.d. 
1820 was promptly followed up by the arrival at Santa Fe, in a.d. 1821, 
of no fewer than three rival American caravans, racing one another to be 
the first in the New Mexican market; 3 and the arrival of a single great 
organized American caravan from Independence, Missouri, was an 
annual event at Santa Fd during the years a.d. 1S30-44. 4 The American 
occupation of Oregon, which had been begun by seamen sailing round 
Cape Horn, was confirmed by a north-westward overland trek across the 
Great Plains which was first achieved in a.d. 1832 5 and which was con¬ 
summated in a.d. 1843, when for the first time wagons went all the way. 6 
The first overland trek from Kansas to California was made in a.d. 1841, 7 
and in a.d. 1844 wagons went all the way on this trail likewise. 8 The 
Mormons made their trek from Iowa to Utah, right across the middle 
zone of the Plains, in a.d. 1847, and in a.d. 1S49 the 'Gold Rush’ to 
California was made overland across the Plains, as well as by the more 
circuitous maritime route round Cape Horn. The first coach travelled 
from Tipton, Missouri, to San Francisco on the 15th September-ioth 
October, 1858. 9 

These divers transits of the Great Plains from the Eastern United 
States to the Rocky Mountains, and beyond these to the Pacific Coast, 
between a.d. 1821 and a.d. 1859, 10 all occurred during a period when, as 
we have observed, it was the United States Government’s official policy 
to maintain, more Hispanico, a permanent limes along the borderline, cast 
of Meridian 98°, between the woodland and the prairie; and there was an 
inconsistency between policy and practice that was fraught with eventual 
trouble; for these widely ramifying and rapidly multiplying American 
trespasses on the hunting grounds of the Plains Indians were provoca¬ 
tive, and ‘the discovery of gold in the Pike’s Peak country touched off 
the inevitable conflict. A hundred thousand miners crossed the Plains in 


» See Billington, op. cit, p. 43s. 

* Webb, op. tit., p. 86. See the maps in Paxson, op. tit., p. 307, and in Billington, 
op. tit., p. 430. 

J Sec Billington, op. tit, p. 46a. * See ibid., p. 463. 

* See ibid., pp. 513-14. 6 See ibid., pp. 5 * 4 - 6 . 



648 HEROIC AGES 

1859, elbowed their way into Cheyenne and Arapaho lands, and drove the 
Indians from their homes. Resentment bred of those outrages was 
infectious’, 1 and the sequel was the series of wars between the Plains 
Indians and the United States Army which went on from a.d. 1861 to 
a.d. 1876. These wars ended, as we have seen, in the Indians being 
defeated on the battlefield and being corralled in reservations; in other 
words, they ended in the abandonment, after a forty years’ trial, of the 
policy of maintaining a limes at the eastern edge of the Great Plains. But 
the denouement which thus liquidated the United States’ limes along 
the eastern edge of the prairie was, of course, the opposite of the 
classical denouement along artificial limites between civilizations and 
barbarians. The catastrophe that eventually turned the limes here into 
a superfluous anachronism was not the collapse of the Power that had 
established it; it was the crushing of the transfrontier barbarians against 
whom it had been designed as a defence for the society that had been 
domiciled on the inner side of it. 

The United States’ Army’s victory over the Plains Indians in the 
warfare of a.d. 1861-76 was conclusive because, by this time, the Army’s 
military striking power was being reinforced by the impetus of an ex¬ 
panding population that was now pressing in upon the Great Plains from 
the Far West as well as from the East. The military decision was clinched 
on the economic plane by the extermination, between a.d. 1867 and 
a.d. 1883, of the game on which the Plains Indians had lived as parasites. 
The discovery in a.d. 1871 of a profitable commercial use for buffalo 
hides led to an annual slaughter, at the rate of three million victims a 
year, over the years 1872-4; the Great Southern Herd was extinct by 
a.d. 1878, the Great Northern Herd by a.d. 1883; and by a.d. 1903 no 
more than thirty-four living specimens were to be found of a species 
which had probably been represented on the Plains by about thirteen 
million head before the advent of the rifle. 2 This destruction of the non¬ 
human, as well as the human, fauna that had tenanted the Great Plains 
hitherto left the American people in command of the solitude that they 
had made; but the eviction of the previous pre-Columbian tenants had 
not settled the question how the new occupants of Transatlantic proven¬ 
ance would utilize their tardily acquired prairie estate. 

The American farmer was not to bring the Great Plains under the 
plough till he had followed up the United States’ Army’s conclusive 
victory over the Plains Indian Nomad hunting tribes by fighting, on the 
morrow of the overt Civil War of a.d. 1861-5, an undeclared civil war 
in which the opposing parties were neither the North versus the South 
nor the farmer versus the planter but the sedentary tiller of the ground 
versus the Nomad keeper of livestock. 3 After farmer Cain had rid him¬ 
self of hunter Nimrod, 4 he had still to settle accounts with herdsman 
Abel; and in North America, as in the Old World, the struggle for life 
between Cain and Abel was as savage as the stakes were high. Even 
before the Plains Indian and the buffalo had disappeared from the 
scene, the contest for possession of the Great Plains of North America 

1 Billinffton, op. cit., p. 654. * Sec ibid., pp. 667-8. 

3 Gen. iv. 2. * Gen. x. 9. 



THE CHALLENGE OF THE GREAT PLAINS 649 
was already being fought out between an American farmer with the 
traditions of some six to ten thousand years of husbandry behind him 
and an American avatar of the Eurasian Nomad herdsman who, in a.d. 
1866, sprang fully armed from the dragon’s-tooth seed which the Civil 
War of a.d. 1861-5 had sown in the pastures of the Nueces Valley at the 
southernmost extremity of the Great Plains on the Gulf Coast of 
Western Texas. 

'Phis economic and social conflict between an American Cain, branded 
with the mark of his Transatlantic provenance, and an American Abel, 
who had made a dramatic second epiphany in a New World, lasted four 
times as long as the military Civil War to which it was an epilogue; for, 
though the American farmer, with the aid of the American industrialist, 
succeeded in making an effective lodgement on the Great Plains in the 
course of the eighteen-seventies, the American cowboy had anticipated 
him by spreading all over the Plains between a.d. 1866 and a.d. 1880, 1 
and it was not till after the speculative boom of a.d. 1880-5 in the cattle 
industry had precipitated the crash of a.d. 1885-7, 2 an< * after the 
shepherd had made a half-hearted attempt to elbow his way in, 3 that the 
farmer found himself relieved of his competitor the herdsman thanks to 
Abel's follies and misfortunes rather than to Cain’s own prowess. Even 
then, when the farmer’s successive human rivals in the fight for posses¬ 
sion of the Great Plains of North America had all passed away, Cain’s 
acquisition of the disputed territory was by no means assured; for the 
Indian hunter, Texan cowboy, and Far Western shepherd had none of 
them been such formidable adversaries as Physical Nature was to show 
herself to be; and in a.d. 1952 it still remained to be seen whether the 
Great Plains would prove permanently amenable to Cain’s high-handed 
attempt, with the aid of his offspring Tubal-Cain the artificer,' 4 to 
annex these dry grasslands to Ceres’ empire. 

Whatever the ultimate destiny of Agriculture on the Great Plains 
might be, there was no indication in the sixth decade of the twentieth 
century of the Christian Era that Cain’s discomfited pastoral rival was 
likely to try conclusions with him here again. In the economic and social 
history of the United States the rise and fall of ‘the Cattle Kingdom’ 
had been no more than a brilliant flash in the trigger-pan ; J yet, for 
a student of the geneses of civilizations, the amply recorded history 
of an abortive pastoral civilization in North America which had 
come and gone between a.d. 1866 and a.d. 1887 was an episode 
of surpassing interest in so far as it provided authentic materials 
for reconstructing, by analogy, the lost history of the genesis, round 
about the turn of the third and second millennia B.C., of a pastoral 
civilization on the Eurasian Steppe which had had a subsequent life¬ 
span of some four thousand years’ duration—in the course of which it 
had produced momentous effects on the histories of all its sedentary 
neighbours. 

In the abortive yet none the less illuminating nineteenth-century 

» See Billington, op. dt., p. 679. * See ibid., pp. 683-6. 

J See ibid., p. 687. 4 Gen. iv. 22. . 

s Accounts of this episode in the history of the United States will be found in 
Paxson, op. cit., chap. 56; Webb, op. cit., chap. 6; Billington, op. cit., chap. 33. 

B 2S93.vju Y 2 



650 HEROIC AGES 

North American instance an historian could watch the process by which, 
in the Nueces Valley, a composite society, in which human beings, 
horses, and cattle were co-operating with one another, under human 
management, to make a living off an uncultivated grassland, 1 came into 
existence as an economic and social appendage to a neighbouring seden¬ 
tary agricultural society 2 and then suddenly made what was tantamount 
to a declaration of economic and social independence by taking the 
whole vast prairie for its realm 3 and claiming to deal, on terms of equality, 
with agricultural neighbours to whose economy ‘the Cattle Kingdom’ 
had previously been subsidiary. This significant passage of history on 
the southernmost sector of the borderland between the eastern wood¬ 
land and the western prairie in North America offered an insight into the 
process through which some sector of the borderland between the Desert 
and the Sown in the Old World—perhaps the fringes of the oasis of 
Anau in Transcaspia—had once given birth to a Nomad pastoral society 
which had then proceeded to propagate itself over the entire Eurasian 
Steppe—as rapidly, for all that we know, as the nineteenth-century North 
American ‘Cattle Kingdom’ spread northwards over the Great Plains 
from the Nueces Valley into Canada between a.d. 1866 and a.d. 1880. 

Even the fratricidal warfare between Cain and Abel, which had played 
so large a part in the histories of the civilizations of the Old World for 
not much less than four thousand years, was rekindled in North America 
during the twenty years for which the North American ‘Cattle Kingdom’ 
lasted; and in the New World, as in the Old World, Cain took upon his 
head the guilt of playing the part of the aggressor. As recently as a.d. 
1865 the farmers of Western Missouri had, at least in sympathy if not in 
action, 4 been on the same side as the cowboys of South-Western Texas 
in a fierce civil war between a Southern Confederacy and a Union from 
which it was striving to secede. Yet in a.d. 1866, when the Texan cow¬ 
boys, on the first of their annual northward cattle-drives, were bearing 
down upon railhead at Scdalia, within the limits of cultivation in 
Western Missouri, they were attacked and robbed by ‘embattled farmers’ 
who, the year before, had been, at least in spirit, their fellow Con¬ 
federates. 5 ‘Ferocious Plains Indians . . . were to be preferred to the 
Missourians’; 6 for the feud between South and North on the political 
surface of life did not avail, even in the year following the date of the 
Confederacy’s overthrow, to maintain the solidarity of the South against 
the disruptive effect of a more ancient feud between Cain and Abel that 
had suddenly erupted from a source deep down in the abyss of a Col¬ 
lective Subconscious Psyche with a violence almost equal to that of the 
still more ancient feud between Cain and Nimrod. 

1 See III. iii. 10 and 13-14 for this feature in the organization of the Nomad pastoral 
societies of the Old World. 

1 Cp. III. iii. 10-it. 1 Cp. III. iii. 11-13. 

* Missouri was one of the border slave-states that had failed to secede from the Union 
in A.D. 1861; but the hearts of perhaps a majority of her population had been on the 
Southern side throughout the Civil War of a.d. 1861-5. 

* See Webb, op. cit., pp. 217-19; Billington, op. cit., pp. 673-5. 

6 Webb, op. cit., p. 219. 



VIII. D, ANNEX 

‘THE MONSTROUS REGIMENT OF WOMEN’ 1 


The Heroic Age might have been expected to be a masculine age par 
excellence. Docs not the evidence convict it of having been an age of 
brute force? And, when force is given a free rein, what chance can 
women have of holding their own against the physically dominant sex ? 
This a priori logic is confuted by the facts; for the facts show that this 
Heroic Age of unbridled adolescent barbarism can challenge comparison 
with a Matriarchal Age of primitive agriculture and with a Shorthand- 
typist Age of elderly business organization as an age in which women 
were in the ascendant. Let us survey these paradoxical facts before we 
try to discover the explanation of them. 

In the Heroic Age the great catastrophes arc apt to be women’s work, 
even when the woman’s role is ostensibly passive. If Alboin’s unsatisfied 
desire for Rosamund was the cause of the extermination of the Gepidae, 
it is credible that the sacking of Troy was provoked by the satisfaction 
of Paris’ desire for Helen, 2 and that Haethcyn brought disaster on him¬ 
self by carrying off a Swedish Queen. 1 More commonly the women arc 
undisguisedly the mischief-makers whose malice drives the heroes into 
slaying one another. The legendary quarrel at Worms between Brunhild 
and Kriemhild, which eventually discharged itself in the slaughter in 
Etzel’s Danubian hall, has its Icelandic counterpart in Hallgerda’s 
quarrel with Bergthora which eventually resulted in Njal’s house being 
burnt over his head; and, though, in the saga as well as in the epic, the 
maker’s art has spun fiction out of fact, we may assume that the fiction 
has commended itself because it is true to life. 4 It is indeed all of one 
piece with the authentic incidents of the historical quarrel between the 
legendary Brunhild’s nobly ferocious namesake 5 and her basely ferocious 
enemy Fredegund, which cost the Merovingian successor-state of the 
Roman Empire forty years of civil war. 6 


* The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women is the title 
of a pamphlet published by John Knox in a.d. 1558. 

* The legendary Trojan War is presented by Herodotus (Book I, chap. 5) as the first 
round in a thenceforth perennial warfare between Hellenes and Orientals which is the 

i ilot of his historical drama, while the Rape of Helen, which was the Trojan War’s 
rgendary cause, was, according to him (Book I, chaps. 1-4), the fourth of a series of 
incidents of the kind, in which Io, Europa, and Medea had been Helen’s predecessors 
(see pp. 4 S 4 - 7 , above). The Orientals had started this series of abductions by carrying 
off Io, but the Hellenes had been the first to commit the criminal folly of making an 
abduction a casus belli. 'To abduct women was a crime, but to take their abduction 
seriously enough to insist on reprisals was a folly, since it was obvious that these women 
would not have got themselves abducted if they had not so desired’ (Book I, chap. 4). In this 
satirical introduction to a work of genius the sophisticated Hellenic historian has wittily 
travestied one of the traditional motifs of a post-Minoan ‘heroic’ saga. 

J Beowulf, 11 . 2930 ff., cited by H. M. Chadwick in The Heroic Age (Cambridge 1912, 
University Press), p. 337. 

* See I. i. 449-50. 

» An appreciation of the. historical Brunhild’s character will be found in Dill, S.: 
Roman Society in Gaul in the Merovingian Age (London 1926, Macmillan), pp. 172-3 
and 332-4. 

6 For the causes of the quarrel between Brunhild and Fredegund, to which this forty- 
years’ war was the sequel, sec p. 654, below. 



6 s 2 HEROIC AGES 

‘It is well to bear in mind the story of the war between the Angli and 
the Warni, a war which owed its origin to Radiger’s repudiation of his 
marriage contract with the English King’s sister.... This story comes, not 
from a poem, but from the work of a strictly contemporary Roman his¬ 
torian. ... In the story of Radiger we see how a young princess was able 
to gather together a huge army and bring about a sanguinary struggle 
between two nations on account of an insult offered to her by a neigh¬ 
bouring king. Again, Paulus Diaconus 1 states that the war between the 
Heruli and the Langobardi was due to the murder of the Herulian King|s 
brother by a Langobardic princess. Even if this story is untrue, it is 
significant enough that it should obtain credit... . According to Gregory 
of Tours 1 the overthrow of the Burgundian kingdom [in Savoy] was due 
to the instigation of Hrothhild, who implored her sons to exact vengeance 
for the murder of her parents—a case not unlike the Norse version of the 
story of Hamdhir and Sdrli. Hildeberht’s invasion of Spain was under¬ 
taken in answer to messages from his sister Hlothhild, who had been ill- 
treated by her husband, the Visigothic King Amalaric.* The dissensions 
which eventually brought about the downfall of the Thuringian kingdom 
had their origin in the proud and jealous character of Amalaberga, the wife 
of Irminfrith. 4 Unless weare prepared to shutoureyesto the plain evidence 
of History, we are bound to recognise that the personal feelings of queens 
and princesses were among the very strongest of the factors by which the 
politics of the Heroic Age were governed. 5 

These words ring as true to Macedonian barbarian life in a post- 
Achaemenian heroic age as to Teutonic barbarian life in a post-Hellcnic 
heroic age. 

‘It was in the character and action of the Seleucid and Ptolemaic queens 
that the Macedonian blood and tradition showed itself. Both dynasties 
exhibit a series of strong-willed, masculine, unscrupulous women of the 
same type as those who fought and intrigued for power in the old Mace¬ 
donian Kingdom. The last Cleopatra of Egypt is the best known to us, 
but she was only a type of her class. There was no relegation of queens and 
princesses to the obscurity of a harem. They mingled in the political game 
as openly as the men. It was in the political sphere, rather than in that 
of sensual indulgence, that their passions lay and their crimes found a 
motive. Sometimes they went at the head of armies. ... It is only in the 
intensity and recklessness with which they pursue their ends that we see 
any trace of womanhood left in them.’ 6 

The influence of women over men in the Heroic Age had not, of 
course, been exhibited solely in the crudely malevolent practice of goad¬ 
ing the men into fratricidal strife. No women had left deeper marks on 
history than Alexander’s mother Olympias and Mu'awiyah’s mother 
Hind, and these two viragos had immortali2cd themselves, not by their 
recorded deeds of passion and violence, 7 but by their life-long moral 

1 See his Hiitoria Lcr.gobardorum, Book I, chap. 20. 

* See his Hiitoria Francorum, Book III, chap. 6. 

1 See ibid.. Book III, chap. zo. « Sec ibid., Book III, chap. 4. 

5 Chadwick, op. cit., pp. 337-8 and 372. 

6 Bc ^ n ’ R *’ > ^ he " mut °J Stlrutus (London 1902, Edward Arnold, 2 vols.), vol. ii, 

7 Hind is reported to have bitten the liver of her slain enemy Hamzah's corpse on the 
battlefield of Uhud (Margoliouth, D. S.: Mohammed and the Rise 0/ Islam (New York 
1905, Putnam), p. 306). As for the deeds of Olympias, the charge-sheet was graven on 



'THE MONSTROUS REGIMENT OF WOMEN’ 653 
ascendancy over their redoubtable sons—an ascendancy that was not 
impaired by their separation from the husbands to whom these sons had 
been born by them. Mu'Swiyah always delighted in speaking of himself 
as ‘the son of Hind’, and used to put his mother at the head of the list 
when he was enumerating the glories of his family; 1 and Alexander, for 
his part, was at heart his mother's son, who had cloven to Olympias when 
her estrangement from Philip had come to an open breach—a resolution 
of psychological forces which is aptly symbolized in the myth that the 
hero was begotten on his mother, not by his legitimate human father, 
but by an imperious heavenly sire. 1 

After Alexander’s premature death, Olympias entered the arena of 
Macedonian cut-throat politics as a principal and duly met her own 
death at the hands of as ruthless a criminal as herself in the person of 
Cassander. Zcnobia, the widow of Odcnathus prince of Palmyra, and 
‘A’ishah, the widow of the Prophet Muhammad and the daughter of his 
first khalifah Abu Bakr, embarked on similar ventures without being 
made to pay for failure with their lives. Zenobia’s life was spared by her 
grim conqueror Aurclian, 3 even after she had repeated her attempt to 
carve a Palmyrene Arab barbarian successor-state out of the Roman 
Empire; 4 and ‘A’ishah was left in peace by her chivalrous conqueror 
‘All after he had defeated her in the one signal victory in his otherwise 
disappointing career.* The death of the Selcucid Emperor Antiochus II, 
‘the god’, was the signal for his rival widows, a Seleucid Laodice at 
Ephesus and a Lagid Berenice at Antioch, to plunge the Asiatic Mace¬ 
donian successor-state of the Achaemenian Empire into civil strife 
which festered into an international war between the Seleucid and 
Ptolemaic Powers when Berenice's brother Ptolemy III Euergctes of 
Egypt took up arms to avenge his sister’s death after she had been 
assassinated through the treachery of a trusted physician who was 
secretly in Laodice’s service. 6 The Merovingian successor-state of the 
Roman Empire in Gaul was similarly plunged into a civil war—which 
dragged on for forty years 7 —by two rival queens who did not wait for 

the hearts of two men—Philip and Antipater—who, on this subject, found Alexander 
infatuatedly blind. 

1 Lammens, S.J., Le Pire H.: Etudes sur le Rtgne du Calife Omaiyade Mo'duia l fT (Paris 
1908, Geuthner), p. 69. Cf. eundem: La Mccque a la Veille de IMgire (Bayrut 1924, 
Imprimerie Catholiquc), D. 170. The spirit which captivated Hind’s son is exemplified 
in ner bearing towards Muhammad at the levie at which she found herself constrained 
to declare her allegiance to the conqueror after the capitulation of Mecca (see Mar- 
goliouth, op. cit., p. 390), and in her trading venture, financed with money borrowed 
from the public treasury by leave of the Caliph ‘Umar, after she had been divorced by 
her husband Abu Sufyin (see Lammens, op. cit., pp. 169-70). 

* See V. vi. 267-8. 

J Aurclian’8 death-warrant was addressed, not to Zcnobia, but to her male academi¬ 
cian Longinus. 

* The successor-state that Zenobia did momentarily establish at her first attempt was 
an abortive anticipation of the Ghassanid phylarchy on the Roman Empire’s Syrian 
limes, and of Muhammad's oasis-principality of Medina whose capital was transferred 
by Mu'Swiyah to Damascus (see 1. i. 74; II. ii. ix; VI. vii. 131 and 208-9). 

1 At the Battle of the Camel {commissum 9 Dec., a.d. 656) it was not 'A’ishah, but 
her male confederates Talhah and Zubayr, who lost their lives. 

6 See Bevan, E. R.: The Home of Seleucus (London 1902, Arnold, 2 vols.), vol. i, 

"V&fcl , S.: Roman Society in Gaul in the Merovingian Age (London 1926, Mac¬ 
millan), p. 174. 



654 HEROIC AGES 

their husbands to be removed from the arena by assassination before 
taking into their own hands the pursuit of a quarrel which for them was 
a personal blood-feud. 

Fredcgund of Neustria had a grievance against her paramour Chilperic 
that was comparable to the grievance of Laodice of Ephesus against her 
husband Antiochus—though not indeed a grievance of equal magnitude, 
since Laodice was not only Antiochus’s wedded wife but was also his 
half-sister, whereas Fredegund was a maidservant who was her master’s 
concubine. Chilperic dismissed his concubine Fredegund, besides re¬ 
pudiating his lawful wife Audovera, in order to contract a politically 
advantageous marriage with Galswintha, the daughter of Athanagild 
King of the Visigoths and the sister of Chilperic’s brother Sigiberht's wife, 
Queen Brunhild of Austrasia. 1 Chilperic’s and Antiochus’s second mar¬ 
riages had the same motive and the same denouement in the literal sense 
of the word. In the sequel in either case the fickle king’s first love pre¬ 
vailed over raison d'itat, but Galswintha was more unfortunate than 
Berenice; for the Lagid queen survived her desertion by her Seleucid 
husband, to seize and hold half his inheritance before she met her violent 
end, whereas Galswintha’s life was taken by Fredegund with Chilperic’s 
connivance—a complicity that was flagrantly advertised when Chilperic 
rewarded his former concubine for the murder of his royal sister-in- 
law’s royal sister by taking the bondwoman-murderess to wife. The 
blood-feud thus ignited between Brunhild and Fredegund was inflamed 
when Brunhild’s husband Sigiberht was treacherously stabbed to death 
(with poisoned daggers) by agents of Fredegund in the hour of his 
victory, while he was being saluted by his brother Chilperic’s Neustrian 
warriors as their king, 2 and it was exacerbated still further when, nine 
years later, 3 Chilperic in his turn w r as assassinated by an unknown hand 
whose stab was never brought home to its instigator. Fredegund died in 
her bed ; 4 Brunhild was done to death sixteen years later 3 by Frcdcgund’s 
son Chlothar II under tortures 6 which Olympias was spared in her 
judicial murder by Cassander. 

These militant queens were not always content to leave even the 
physical fighting entirely to their male proxies. The fight in which 
‘A’ishah’s warriors were worsted by ‘All’s acquired its name ‘the Battle 
of the Camel’ from ‘A’ishah’s personal presence on the field in her 
curtained camel-howdah ‘wie ein Kriegsheiligtum’ ; 7 and Berenice the 
rival of Laodice literally took up arms at a crisis in her fortunes, when 
Laodice’s partisans in Antioch had succeeded in kidnapping Berenice’s 
infant son, whose claim to the Seleucid crown was the indispensable 
cloak under which his mother, like her rival, was fighting for her own 
hand. 


‘In this extremity Berenice showed the spirit of a lioness. The child was 

« For the antithesis between Austrasia and N'custria, see II. ii. 167. 

* See Dill.op. cit.,pp. 13-—* o: - 1 —**•-— J —. 

of Siegfried’s legend 
critically as Queen 
Chilperic. 

4 \‘ x> ' 5 ^ 7 ;. , . 5 * n „ A - D - 6 »3- 6 See Dill, op. cit., *pp. 211 and 232. 

7 Becker, C. H.: Itlamiiudten, vol. i (Leipzig 1924, Quelle and Meyer), p. 101. 




‘THE MONSTROUS REGIMENT OF WOMEN' 655 

believed to have been carried to a certain house. Berenice instantly 
mounted a chariot, took in her own hand a spear, and galloped to the spot. 
On the way, Caeneus [Laodicc’s leading partisan at Antioch] met her. 
The Queen aimed her spear at him. It missed. Nothing daunted, Berenice 
followed it with a stone, which brought her enemy down.’ 1 

This historical episode lends colour to a legendary scene; for Brunhild 
likewise, in her assault-at-arms with Gunther, in which the female 
combatant’s hand and the male combatant’s life arc the stakes, follows 
up with a stone’s throw a spear-cast that has failed to kill. 2 

The evidence that we have now reviewed is perhaps sufficient to 
demonstrate that the Heroic Age is the age of opportunity for Goneril 
and Regan. Aristotle notices that ‘most of the military and warlike breeds 
of men are under the regiment of women’ ; 3 but he does not discover for 
us the explanation of these facts that he has observed, for he records this 
observation incidentally to a discussion of the reason why gynaecocracy 
—‘the regiment of women’—prevailed likewise at Sparta under the 
Lycurgcan agdgS in its decadence, and his solution for this problem of 
Spartan psychology—a solution that is as convincing as it is acute 4 —is 
manifestly inapplicable to ‘the regiment of women’ over barbarian 
warriors in the Heroic Age. 

To explain this peculiar phenomenon at Sparta, Aristotle puts his 
finger on the peculiar severity of the discipline to which the male half of 
the Spartiatc community was subjected. As he points out, the authors 
and administrators of the agdgi had neglected—or had tried in vain— 
to impose on the Spartiatc women a way of life that they had succeeded 
in imposing on the men with all too complete a success—with the result 
that the Spartiate women were at an advantage, in their dealings with 
the men, thanks to their own unrestricted enjoyment of a liberty, and 
even a licence, which were rigorously denied to their fathers, brothers, 
and husbands. Manifestly this explanation is as inapplicable to the 
barbarians as it is convincing apropos of the Spartans; for, in this matter 
of libertarianism, the barbarian warrior labours under no handicap 
whatsoever vis-d-vts his mother, sister, or wife. As we have already 
observed in the chapter to which this Annex attaches, the life of the 
barbarian warrior squatting in his moral glum 5 inside a fallen limes is as 

1 Be van, op. cit., vol. i, p. 182. Berenice’s presence of mind and physical prowess 
did not avail to enable her to recover possession of her child’s body, alive or dead; 
but they did avail to win her such a preponderance of popular sympathy among the 
citizens of Antioch that the slain Caeneus fellow municipal magistrates, who had been 
his accomplices in kidnapping Berenice's child on Laodicc’s behalf, found themselves 
constrained to exhibit a child to the people as the infant king. 

1 We arc not, of course, suggesting that the assault-at-arms between Brunhild and 
Gunther, described in the rlibelungtnhtd, was an historical event. In the legendary Brun¬ 
hild we have, not a poetic reminiscence of an historical personage, but a poetic trans¬ 
formation of a goddess into a human heroine. The legendary Brunhild, as her name bears 
witness, was originally n war-goddess clad in a coat of mail; and this origin, which is 
no longer discernible in the High German Nibelungmlied, is still manifest m the Norse 
Volnmgar Saga. 

> Aristotle: Politics, Book II, chap, vi, § 6 (1269 B, 24-27)- He notes, as exceptions 
to this ‘law’, 'the Celts and others who openly practise and approve homosexuality.’ 
This subsidiary law of Aristotle’s had been further illustrated, since Aristotle’s own day, 
by the mores of the Egyptian MamlQks. 

* See the present Study, III. iii. 75. 

* See the passage quoted from H. G. Wells in VIII D, on p. 53, n. 2. 



656 HEROIC AGES 

lawless as the Spartiatc ‘peer’s’ life is regular (so long, at least, as the 
Spartiate ‘peer’ is held fast within the cadres of his mess in peace-time 
and his unit on active service). The explanation of the ‘regiment’ of 
women over the barbarian war-band must therefore lie in some non- 
Spartan direction. There are perhaps two lines of explanation, one 
sociological and the other psychological. 

The sociological explanation is to be found in the fact that the Heroic 
Age is a social interregnum in which the traditional habits of Primitive 
Life in its latter-day Yin-state ! have been broken up, while no new 
‘cake of custom’ had yet been baked by a nascent civilization or nascent 
higher religion. In this unusual and ephemeral social situation a tem¬ 
porary social vacuum is filled by an individualism so absolute that it 
overrides even the intrinsic differences in nature between the sexes. 
This individualism does, of course, tell against women as well as in their 
favour. In the brutal anarchy of the Primitive Muslim Arab heroic age 
the normal inferiority of women to men in sheer physical strength did 
expose the women to the scourge of outright physical ill-treatment—at 
any rate among the Qurayshite lords of creation, whose standard of 
behaviour towards women had previously, in the pre-Islamic ‘Days of 
Ignorance’, already been conspicuously lower, not only than that of their 
sedentary neighbours at Medina, but even than the standard of their 
Nomad contemporaries. 2 Again, it can hardly be an accidental coinci¬ 
dence that the Macedonian, Merovingian, and Primitive Muslim Arab 
heroic ages should, all alike, be infamous for the facility with which the 
heroes divorced their wives—a wrong which was not righted by the 
corresponding facility with which the discarded women were able to 
obtain successive husbands. It is all the more remarkable to find this 
unbridled individualism bearing, in the political field, fruits hardly 
distinguishable from those of a doctrinaire feminism that is altogether 
beyond the emotional range and the intellectual horizon of the women 
and men of the Heroic Age, 3 and to see these openings for the exercise 
of political power presenting themselves to Umayyad Qurayshi prin¬ 
cesses, 4 as well as to their Macedonian forerunners and their Merovingian 
sisters. 

‘In the Heroic Age the state appears to have been regarded as little more 
than the property of an individual—or rather, perhaps, of a family, which 
itself was intimately connected with a number of other families in similar 
positions. ... It is worth noticing what is recorded in Beowulf on an 
occasion of great emergency. Hygelac, King of the Geatas, lost his life 
in the disastrous expedition against the Frisians and left an only son, 
Hcardred, who seems to have been scarcely more than a child. Beowulf 
escaped from the slaughter; and, on his return, “Hygd offered him the 
treasury and the government, the rings and the throne. She trusted not 
that her child would be able to hold his patrimony against foreign 

1 See II. i. 191-5. 

2 See Lnmmens, S.J., Le Pire H.: Etudet sur le Rfgne du Calife Omaiyadt Mo'aicia l 1 ’ 
(Paris 1908, Geuihner), pp. 314-24- 

2 'Le fdminiame, il faut bicn en convenir, ne rcncontrait pas k cette rfpoque dcs 
panisana en Arabic, m*mc dans its rang* du beau sexe’ (Lammcns, op. cit., p. 3x6). 

4 Sec I.ammcns, op. cit., p. 329. Under the subsequent 'Abbasid rigime, princesses 
lost the prestige and power that had been theirs under the Umayyad dispensation. 



'THE MONSTROUS REGIMENT OF WOMEN’ 657 

nations, now that Hygelac was dead.”' There is no reference to any action 
on the part of the council or court; but the queen offers the throne to the 
late king’s nephew. The whole passage seems to indicate that the throne, 
with all its rights, was regarded very much like any ordinary family pro¬ 
perty. Its disposition is arranged by the family itself, without any notion 
of responsibility to others; and the members of the court are not taken 
into account any more than the servants in a private household. It may 
perhaps be argued that court poets would be apt to exaggerate the power 
of the royal family, and consequently that the picture of its authority given 
here is misleading. Yet Amalaswintha, who was a contemporary of Hyge¬ 
lac, appears to have acted on her own authority when she associated Thco- 
dahath, the nephew of Thcodric, in the sovereignty with herself after her 
son’s death.’ 1 

In the legend of a post-Minoan heroic age that was current in an 
Hellenic World, the succession of the interloping Pelopidae to the 
preceding Persc'id holders of the lordship of Mycenae was traditionally 
accounted for, as Thucydides points out,* by the fact that the mother of 
the last Perseld king, Eurystheus, was the sister of the first Pelopid king, 
Atreus. On the strength of this relationship on the female side, Eurys¬ 
theus, when he took his departure from Mycenae on a campaign against 
Athens from which he was never to return, was reputed to have left his 
castle and his kingdom in Atreus’ charge; and the queen was the living 
hinge on whom politics turned in the lordship of Ithaca likewise, as the 
story is told in the Odyssey. 

Though, even according to the unexacting standards of the Heroic 
Age, the Cephallenian pallikaria have got shockingly out of hand as 
a result of the twenty years’ absence of their lawful king Odysseus, they 
have not the audacity to liquidate Odysseus’ lordship by formally reduc¬ 
ing their lost king’s son and heir, Telemachus, to a station on an equality 
with their own, until the lost king’s queen, Penelope, shall have con¬ 
sented to leave her missing husband’s house in order to marry one of 
these lordlings’ own number; and, though it is assumed that, if she does 
contract a second marriage, she will return for this purpose to the house 
of her father Icarius, to be given away for a second time from there, it 
is also assumed that, in the choice of her new husband from among her 
xo8 suitors, 4 the last word will lie, not with her father, but with her 
herself. ‘Send your mother away and make her marry the man whom 
her father chooses and whom she prefers’ is the course that is proposed 
to Telemachus by Antinous, parleying as spokesman for all the suitors. 5 
The implication seems to be that, so long as the missing king’s living 
queen remains mistress of her absent husband’s house, her loyalty to 
him—or even merely to his memory, if he should prove to be dead— 
effectively preserves the royal prerogative for Odysseus himself, should 
he live to return, or for his son Telemachus, should he live to grow to 
man’s estate. So long as Penelope can contrive to continue to avoid mak- 

* Beowulf, w. 2369 ff. 

* Chadwick, H. M.: The Heroic Age (Cambridge 19x2, University Press), pp. 336-7 

and 371—2. _ * See Thucydides, Book I, chap. 9. 

* The number counted up by Telemachus in Odyuey, Book XVI, II. 245-55. 

s Odyuey, Book II, 11. 113-14, as translated by E. V. Rieu (London 1945, Penguin 
Books), p. 37. 



658 HEROIC AGES 

ing the operative change in the status quo adhuc, all that her exasperated 
suitors can do is to continue, for their part, to exercise an indirect pres¬ 
sure on their queen and her son by wasting the substance of Odysseus’ 
estate. They do not venture positively to coerce the queen into marrying 
again against her will, notwithstanding their resentful impatience with 
her interminable procrastination. 

‘The regiment of women’ which these episodes reveal is a feature of 
the Heroic Age which fades away as the age itself passes. 

‘In the. earliest records [of English history] which wc possess, women of 
high rank seem to hold a very important and influential position. This 
feature is often ascribed to Southern and Christian influence; but, if so, 
it is not a little remarkable that it is much more prominent in the seventh 
century than in the eighth or ninth. Thus we find Eanfled, the wife of 
Oswio, pursuing a very independent line of action within half a century 
of the conversion, while Cynwise, the wife of the heathen king Penda, 
would seem to have been acting as regent in her husband’s absence, per¬ 
haps like Hygd the wife of Hygclac. Above all, Seaxburg, the wife of the 
convert Coenwalh, is said to have occupied the throne herself after his 
death. Bede’s account of Saint Acthclthryth shows that queens had estates 
and retinues of their own; and this custom also must go back to heathen 
times, for the first reference that wc have to Bamborough, the chief resi¬ 
dence of the Northumbrian kings, is the statement that it was given by the 
heathen king Aethelfrith to his wife Bebbc.’ 1 


The evidence that we have considered so far suggests that 'the regi¬ 
ment of women’ in the Heroic Age is the product of an individualism 
that is temporarily let loose by the breaking of a cake of primitive custom. 
But this explanation is still only a negative one. It indicates the favour¬ 
ableness of the opportunity that the Heroic Age offers to women, without 
explaining the women’s success in turning this opportunity to account. 
A positive explanation is suggested by the reflection that, in the deadly 
game which the criminal barbarian successors of a decadent civilization 
have condemned themselves to play against one another, the trump card 
is not, after all, the sheer physical force in which the male barbarian has 
the advantage over his female opponent as a rule—notwithstanding the 
exceptional physical prowess of a legendary Brunhild and an historical 
Berenice. If the triumphant barbarians' fratricidal conflicts were really 
nothing but trials of physical strength, these jousts would be morally as 
innocent as the fights between rival bulls for supremacy in the herd; but 
even the triumphant barbarian is branded as being still recognizably 
human by the mark of an unexpunged Original Sin; and the fate of 
many a barbarian hero—or villain—of legend or history proclaims that, 
in a struggle for existence between sinful human beings, even when the 
competitors are barbarian-bred, mere physical strength by itself weighs 
light in the scales against demonic psychological forces. The winning 
cards in the barbarians’ internecine struggle for existence among them¬ 
selves are the energy, persistence, vindictiveness, and implacability that 
spring from a perversion of will-power, and the cunning and treachery 
that are hatched by a prostitution of intellectual ability. These are moral 

1 Chadwick, H. M.: The Origin of the English Nation (Cambridge 1907, University 
Press), pp. 314-15. 



‘THE MONSTROUS REGIMENT OF WOMEN’ 659 
and mental qualities with which sinful Human Nature is as richly en¬ 
dowed in the female as in the male; and the masculine victims of a 
Kriemhild, a Fredegund, a Cleopatra, and a Rosamund might aptly echo 
the Pauline cry of distress: 

*We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, 
against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of This World, against 
spiritual wickedness in high places.’ 1 

The Cleopatra whose wickedness most aptly illustrates this text is not 
the notorious daughter of Ptolemy XI Auletes who was the last 
Macedonian queen to seize and lose a throne (though in her, too, a for¬ 
midable vein of barbarian female ruthlessncss lurked beneath a sophisti¬ 
cated ‘make-up’ of decadent Hellenic charm); the prime virago of the 
name 1 is the Cleopatra who was the daughter of Ptolemy VI Philometor 
and was by turns the wife of three male incumbents of the throne of the 
Selcucidac, 3 Alexander Balas and the brothers Demetrius II Nicdtdr 
and Antiochus VII Sidfitcs; for this Cleopatra was the veritable 'Erinys 
of the House of Seleucus’. 4 

Cleopatra ran amok when her incompetent second husband Demetrius, 
turning up again in Syria from a ten years’ captivity (140/139-129 B.c.) 
in Parthia, lost no time in demonstrating, by making as deplorable a fail¬ 
ure of his second reign as he had made of his first, that there was nothing 
new about him beyond the outlandish Parthian beard which advertised 
that, as a captive of the barbarians, he had not even been able to resist 
the temptation to ‘go native’. When the restored Demetrius tried to make 
war on his brother-in-law Ptolemy VII Euergetes II and then suffered yet 
another resounding military defeat at the hands of a pretender to his 
own throne whom Ptolemy had unleashed against him as the simplest 
way of settling accounts, Cleopatra took the law into her own hands. 
She shut the gates of Ptolcmais in her fugitive husband’s face; and, when 
Demetrius was slaughtered on board ship in the harbour of Tyre, by 
orders of the governor, in an attempt to take sanctuary in the temple of 
Melkart, the suspicion that the governor was acting on Queen Cleopatra’s 
instructions was warranted by her unquestioned responsibility for the 
subsequent assassination of her elder son Demetrius when he proclaimed 
himself his father’s successor without submitting to his mother's tutelage. 
Cleopatra thereupon mounted the throne herself with her younger son 
Antiochus VIII ‘Grypus’ as her associate; and, when ‘Grypus’ began to 
show signs of restiveness in the role of his mother’s puppet, Cleopatra 
attempted to make away with him in his turn, and, this time, lost her 
own life as the penalty for failing to take his. Her designs had been 

* Eph. vi. it. 

2 This originally Selcucid family name was introduced into the House of I.Sgus by 
Cleopatra, daughter of Antiochus III, who was married to Ptolemy V Epiphanes nr.d 
governed the Ptolemaic dominions as regent for her son Ptolemy VI Philometor from 
the time of her husband’s death until she died herself, still occupying the seat of power. 

J This identification of her through her Selcucid marriages serves to distinguish her 
from her mother and namesake, who was the daughter, by the Seleudd Cleopatra, of 
Ptolemy V Epiphanes, and who married successively her brothers Ptolemy VI Philo¬ 
metor and Ptolemy VII Euergetes II, and also from a sister and namesake who, like 
their mother, was married to Ptolemy VII Euergetes II and who seized control of the 
Ptolemaic Government after Euergetes Il’a death. 

* Bevan, E. R.: The House of Seleucus (London 1902, Arnold, 2 vols.), vol. ii, p. 212. 



660 HEROIC AGES 

betrayed to her intended victim by traitors in her own household; and, 
when she offered ‘Grypus’ a poisoned cup, he forced her to drink the 
lethal draught herself. 1 

Gepid Rosamund died the same death as Macedonian Cleopatra; but 
Rosamund’s paramour and fellow murderer Helmechis was less lucky 
than Cleopatra’s son and fellow sovereign Antiochus. Helmechis had 
received no information in advance to prepare him for the emergency, 
and he swallowed half the potion which Rosamund had offered to him 
before he realized that it was poisoned—though he did realize this just in 
time to make ‘Grypus’s’ effective retort of forcing the rest of the poison 
down the viper lady’s throat; so Helmechis merely compelled his 
murderess-mistress to share with him a death which overtook him 
according to her plan, whereas Antiochus VIII ‘Grypus’ outlived his 
mother to spend the rest of his reign, no longer incommoded by her 
leading-strings, in fighting an inconclusive civil war with his half- 
brother and first-cousin Antiochus IX Cyzicenus, the son whom Cleo¬ 
patra had born to her third husband, ‘Grypus’s’ uncle, Antiochus VII 
SidetSs. 

Rosamund’s career, which thus had the same ending as Cleopatra’s, is 
an epitome of the Heroic Age which illustrates almost every aspect of 
barbarian criminality. 

In the first act, as we have noticed, 2 Rosamund undergoes Helen’s 
legendary experience of being the passive, and perhaps innocent, cause 
of the extermination of a people and the slaying of its king—with the 
miserable difference that, in Rosamund’s historical tragedy, the exter¬ 
minated people are her own countrymen, the slain king is her own 
father, and her personal fate is the excruciating one of being taken to wife 
by. her father’s slayer, as the prize of a successful act of bloodthirsty 
aggression to which the Lombard king Alboin has been prompted by 
his unsatisfied desire to possess the Gepid King Cunimund’s daughter. 

The second act shows Rosamund, some seven years later, in residence 
with her husband in his palace at Verona: the capital of a successor-state 
of the Roman Empire in Italy which Alboin has been carving out for 
himself since his destruction of Rosamund’s race on a Central European 
battlefield. In an inauspicious hour, Alboin, being already the worse for 
drink, sends for the drinking-cup which has been made for him out of 
Cunimund’s skull, and tells his cup-bearer to offer it to the queen with 
an invitation ‘to drink merrily with her father’. Rosamund duly drinks 
from the skull without visible demur, and inwardly determines on a 
revenge which, in the third act, she duly executes. 

In this third act Rosamund incites King Alboin’s foster-brother and 
armour-bearer Helmechis to conspire with her for the compassing of 
Alboin’s death. She lures her chosen instrument with the offer of her 
own hand and the prospect of entering into her husband’s and his 
master’s heritage—for it is assumed that the Lombard crown will pass 
with its murdered owner’s Gepid queen, even if the queen is, by proxy, 

1 This last chapter in Cleopatra’s life is recounted by E. R. Bcvan in The House of 
Seleucus (London 1902, Arnold, 2 volt.), voL ii, pp. 230-2. 

* On p. 651, above. 



‘THE MONSTROUS REGIMENT OF WOMEN* 661 
the king’s murderess. Helmechis succumbs to his temptress, but makes 
the enlistment of Alboin’s chamberlain Peredeo a condition of his own 
participation; and, when Rosamund proceeds to approach Peredeo, 
the chamberlain rejects the queen’s overture. Peredeo’s negative loyalty 
to Alboin puts Rosamund in a quandary. Her murderous machinations 
have been brought to a halt, and her own life is now at the mere}' of an 
unresponsive confidant; but in this crisis she succeeds in turning the 
tables on the chamberlain by a move in which she exhibits a shameless¬ 
ness which is as remarkable as her presence of mind. Peredeo’s loyalty 
to Alboin has not gone to the positive length of leading him to warn the 
King of the conspiracy which the chamberlain has refused to join; and, 
without giving Peredeo time to have any saving second thoughts, 
Rosamund effectively compromises her potential delator by taking the 

C ;e of one of her ladies-in-waiting with whom the King’s chamberlain 
a liaison, and confronting Peredeo with the foit accompli of having 
unwittingly seduced the King’s wife. It is now no longer Rosamund, but 
Peredeo, who is in danger of being denounced to Alboin; his peril 
ensures his treason, and in the last scene of this third act of the drama— 
a scene in which King Alboin, like King Malcolm, is murdered in his 
bed—it is apparently Peredeo, not Helmechis, who plays Macbeth’s 
part. Perhaps Helmechis has found himself unable to summon up the 
hardihood—which assuredly would not have failed Rosamund had she 
been cither of her masculine accomplices—to break a twofold tabu by 
personally taking the life of a foster-kinsman who is at the same time his 
lord. 1 

The fourth act shows us Rosamund’s deed of vengeance duly 
accomplished, but Helmechis disappointed of the political prize that 
was to have been half his reward for lending himself to the execution 
of his royal temptress’s criminal plot. The crime has proved too shock¬ 
ing to be condoned even by barbarian consciences; and, instead of 
mounting together the murdered Alboin’s throne, Rosamund and 
Helmechis have had to flee together for their lives. They have been given 
asylum by the Constantinopolitan viceroy of Italy, who has found it 
easier to ship Alboin’s murderers, with Alboin’s treasure in their bag¬ 
gage, from Verona to the viceroy’s water-girt fastness-capital at Ravenna 
than to withstand a living Alboin’s prowess in wresting from the Roman 
Empire a recently recovered dominion which it is the viceroy’s duty to 
defend. In the astonishing transformation scene now staged in Fortune’s 
kaleidoscope the initiative is thrown into the viceroy’s hands, and he 
proves himself as brilliant in intrigue as he has been contemptible in 
war. The achievement of her revenge has left Rosamund still unsatisfied; 
for her vindictiveness has been alloyed with ambition, and her dream 
of ruling at Verona with Helmechis as her consort-puppet, which was in 
her mind when she offered the wretch her hand in exchange for her first 
husband’s death, has been shattered by the Lombards’ disconcerting 

« When Alexander did slay his foster-kinsman Cleitus, there was at least only one 
tabu violated, since in this case the foster-victim was the King’s retainer, while the King 
himself played the foster-murderer’s part; and, besides that, the Macedonian counterpart 
of the Lombard crime was committed, not premcditatedly in cold blood, but at a moment 
when both men were drunk and when neither of them was compos mentis. 



662 HEROIC AGES 

squeamishness. To find herself married to Helmechis as her fellow 
refugee at Ravenna is a predicament for which she has not bargained; 
and the viceroy is as quick to espy and attack the barbarian virago’s 
c 6 ti faible as Rosamund herself has been to get Helmechis and Peredeo 
into her toils. 'Why not,’ whispers the viceroy to the virago—‘Why not 
repeat your exploit of murdering a husband and thereby put yourself 
in a position to marry me ? Though unfortunately I cannot reinstate you 
in your late husband’s kingdom, which I have failed to prevent his carv¬ 
ing out and which you have failed to seize for yourself, I can at any rate 
make you vicereine of what Alboin has left to me of Roman Italy.’ The 
temptress, thus tempted in her turn, readily swallows her tempter’s bait 
and thereby meets her death, as has been narrated, in tho process of 
carrying out the viceroy’s sly suggestion. 

On learning that Rosamund, as well as Helmechis, was dead, the 
viceroy must have breathed a sigh of relief, for manifestly a lady who 
had successfully made away with two husbands would not have scrupled 
to mete the same measure to a third, had she lived to take this into her 
head. Lucky Longinus! He had escaped the lady and inherited her 
treasure. A Lombard hoard in which the spoils of the Gepidae had been 
augmented by the plunder of the richer half of Italy was something 
worth having. The unfortunate Gepids’ involuntary contribution could 
fairly be booked by the Imperial Auditor-General as interest due on 
capital that had been levied by Alboin in Italy without its lawful Roman 
owners’ leave. Like the good civil servant that he may well have been, 
the viceroy Longinus duly remitted Rosamund’s treasure from Ravenna 
to Constantinople, where it was as utterly out of reach of itching bar¬ 
barian hands as was the treasure of the Nibelungs after Hagen had 
sunk it in the Rhine. 1 

The ironical or censorious spectator who views the tragedy of 
Rosamund from the ivory tower of some place and time far removed 
from the moral slum of the Heroic Age—though not on that account 
immune from other exhibitions of Original Sin—will be better advised 
to apply to the daughter of Cunimund the more charitable verdict that 
has been pronounced by a Christian historian on Philometor’s daughter 
Cleopatra. 

'From her girlhood she had been treated as a thing whose heart did not 
come into consideration, a mere piece in the political game. What wonder 
that she became a politician whose heart was dead ?’ J 

If we ask ourselves whether these women who exercise their ‘mon¬ 
strous regiment’ in the inferno of the Heroic Age arc heroines or vil- 
Iainesses or victims or elusive participants in all three roles, we shall 
arrive at no clear-cut answer to our question. Unquestionably, on the 
other hand, this tragic moral ambivalence makes them ideal subjects for 
poetry; and it is no accident that, in the epic legacy of a post-Minoan 
heroic age, one of the favourite genres should have been ‘catalogues of 

* The story of Rosamund is recounted by Thomas Hodgkin in Italy and her Invaders, 
voLv. Book VI (Oxford 189s, Clarendon Press), pp. 134-40 and 168-73. 0 ° P- «68, 
Hodgkin notes that, in the sagas of the Lombards, ‘women had already played a leading 
part 1 . 2 Bevan, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 250. 



‘THE MONSTROUS REGIMENT OF WOMEN* 663 
women’ in which the recital of one legendary virago’s crimes and suffer¬ 
ings called up the legend of another representative of her kind, in an 
almost endless chain of poetic reminiscences. 1 The historic women whose 
grim lives echo through this poetry would have smiled, with wry 
countenances, could they have foreknown that a reminiscence of a 
reminiscence would one day evoke A Dream of Fair Women in the 
imagination of a Victorian poet. They would have felt decidedly more 
at home in the atmosphere of the third scene in the first act of Macbeth. 

* The epic formula rj of rj ('or such as was’), by which each link in this tragic chain 
was attached to its predecessor, generated the nicknamed HOIAI for catalogues of this 
type. The fragments of two collections of the kind—the HOIAI, alias KATAAOIOE, 
and the MEiAAAI HOIAI —will be found in Aloisius Reach’s edition of the works of 
Hesiod, to whom the authorship of this poetry came to be ascribed (Hetiodi Cartnina 
rcccnsuit Aloisius Rzach, editio altera (Leipzig 190S, Teubner), pp. 131-S7). A longer 
specimen i* embedded in Odyssey, Book XI, 11 . 215-332. 



VIII E (I), ANNEX 

OPTICAL ILLUSIONS IN HESIOD’S VISTA 
OF HISTORY 

In a Dark Age that is pregnant with a new civilization a speculative 
mind is both stirred by the quickening of its social environment and 
cramped by the cribbcdness of its historical horizon. 

This lowness in the degree of historical visibility, with which an 
intellectual worker in a Dark Age is condemned to contend, handi¬ 
capped the superlative genius of Ibn Khaldun in his study of the rises 
and falls of empires; for all the empires of which the great Maghribi 
historian-philosopher had any substantial knowledge belonged to the 
particular—and peculiar—class of empires founded by Nomads. 1 Even 
the Baghdadi 'Abbasid and Cordovan Umayyad caliphates were deriva¬ 
tives of a Damascene Arab Nomad successor-state of the Roman 
Empire; and, in Ibn Khaldun’s vista, this antecedent non-Nomadic 
universal state was barely visible. The authentic sources of Roman 
history were not accessible to the Maghribi scholar; and the inductions 
on which he bases his historical ‘laws’ are thus perforce drawn almost 
exclusively from the histories of a Caliphate originating in the Primitive 
Muslim Arab Vdlkerwanderung and of this Caliphate’s Berber, Arab, 
Turkish, and Mongol Nomad successor-states. A similar limitation of 
historical outlook betrayed the author of the Hesiodic catalogue of races 
into falling a victim to a series of optical illusions. 

We have already noticed 2 that Hesiod is fantastically out of his reckon¬ 
ing in his attempt to take his own generation’s historical bearings. From 
his Epimethcan standpoint he has mistaken the expectant darkness 
before dawn for an eternal night of unrelieved gloom. 3 We have also 
noticed 4 that his vision has played him false even when it has been 
directed towards the past age lying nearest to his own. His astigmatism 
has diffracted the social interregnum immediately following the dissolu¬ 
tion of the Minoan Civilization into a mirage of two separate ages—an 
Age of Bronze and a subsequent Age of Heroes—which, in reality, are 
merely diverse aspects of a single episode of history. But Hesiod’s mental 
vision has not only played him this trick of diffracting one age into the 
semblance of two; it has also led him into the contrary error of‘telescop¬ 
ing’ two, or perhaps even three, ages into the semblance of one. 

The Race of Gold, as Hesiod depicts it, 5 may be interpreted as stand¬ 
ing, in the first instance, for 'the thalassocracy of Minos’—the imposing 
universal state which is the earliest form in which the Minoan Civiliza¬ 
tion will have made an enduring mark on the imagination of its Achaean 

1 This point has been noticed in III. iii. 24. 

1 On pp. 57 and 79-80, above. 

> This illusion of an Hellenic poet in the eighth century B.C. has its counterpart in 
Western history in the expectation—widely current in Western Christendom at and 
after the opening of the eleventh century of the Christian Era—that the end of the World 
was at hand (see I. i. 171, n. 1). 

♦ In VIII. (i) passim, above. s In Works and Days, 11. 109-26. 



HESIOD’S OPTICAL ILLUSIONS 665 

barbarian successors whose epic poetry is Hesiod’s Book of Genesis. On 
this interpretation the Race of Silver, who are the Golden Men’s epigoni, 
will stand for these same Minoan ‘thalassocrats’ in the subsequent 
digringolade which results in their being swept away to leave the field to 
a barbarian Race of Bronze. The Silver Men’s contemptible combina¬ 
tion of babyishness with aggressiveness and godlessness accords with 
this reading of the passage, while, on the same interpretation, the, at 
first sight, surprising meed of honour that is paid to them retrospectively, 
after their unceremonious liquidation, is explicable, not as a tribute to 
virtues with which the Race of Silver is not credited, but as a protest 
against atrocities, perpetrated by an interloping Race of Bronze, which 
make the liquidated Silver Men’s viciousness look amiable by com¬ 
parison. 

While this is undoubtedly one component of Hesiod’s picture of the 
Race of Gold, it can hardly be the only one; for a vista of a civilization 
that sees no farther back than the heyday of its universal state is, of 
course, a drastically foreshortened view; and we may guess that, on a 
different plane of vision, Hesiod’s races of Gold and Silver cover, be¬ 
tween them, the whole history of the Minoan Civilization from start to 
finish—the Race of Gold standing for a Minoan age of growth, and 
the Race of Silver for a Minoan age of disintegration. 

On this interpretation, Hesiod’s Race of Gold and Race of Iron, 
which, in the poet’s vista, seem to stand out at the two poles of his 
graduated scries of morally deteriorating phases of society, prove really 
to be two instances of an identical phase, which feels like an age of iron 
to a poet born into the growth-phase of the Hellenic Civilization, but 
looks golden to him when he is viewing the growth-phase of the alien 
and mysterious Minoan Civilization through the kindly mist of a tradi¬ 
tion that has been mellowed by the passage of the centuries. 

Yet the posthumous glitter of the growth-phase and of the Indian 
Summer of the Minoan Civilization docs not account for all the elements 
in the life of the Race of Gold, as Hesiod describes it. A feature to which 
the poet gives prominence 1 is the Golden Men’s effortless enjoyment of 
an abundant food-supply which the soil produces for them of its own 
accord without exacting from them any agricultural labour; and, though 
this may be no more than a naive barbarian observer’s impression of 
the mysteriously organized life of an urban population whose industry 
commands supplies of food which it has not produced for itself, it may 
also be a genuine recollection of a food-gathering phase of human 
economy—antecedent to the birth of the Minoan or any other civiliza¬ 
tion—in which Primitive Man, after his arduous feat of becoming fully 
human, had rested for a season from his labours in a static Yin-state. 2 
This is the interpretation of the Hesiodic Kpovov fiios that was 
current among latter-day Hellenic men of letters—though the like¬ 
wise Hesiodic myth of Cronos’s overthrow by his usurper-son Zeus 3 
looks more like a reminiscence of the replacement of a fallen Minoan 

« In Works and Days, II. 116-19. 

* See II. i. 192-5 and 290-3, and IV. iv. 585-8. 

3 See Theogony, fl. 71-73. 



666 HEROIC AGES 

‘thalassocracy’ by one of its Achaean barbarian successor-states.’ In an 
age in which this food-gathering economy had been observed in the life 
by Modern Western anthropologists who had tracked down the last of the 
food-gatherers in the fastnesses where they had sought shelter from the 
disturbing impact of the parvenu civilizations, these latter-day observers 
had been able to ascertain that this regime of casual labour was indeed 
a life of relatively low psychological tension by comparison with the 
organized and disciplined life of the husbandman, the shepherd, and the 
industrial worker; but, just because of this, it had proved not to be a life 
of material plenty or comfort. 

On this analysis, Hesiod’s Golden Age dissolves into three ages, one 
of which turns out to be identical with an Iron Age that is not, after all, 
the dead end that Hesiod felt it to be, but is the dayspring that, in retro¬ 
spect, looks like gold. On the other hand, Hesiod's Bronze Age and 
Heroic Age lose their separate identities and melt into a single age for 
which Hesiod’s sombre picture of the Iron Age would serve as an apt 
description. 

* See I. i. 96 and III. iii. 113-14. 



IX. B (I), ANNEX 

THE RELATIVITY OF THE UNIT OF CLASSI¬ 
FICATION TO THE OBJECT OF STUDY 

The ground on which some twenty-one or twenty-three units have been 
treated in this book as so many distinct representatives of a species of 
society that we have labelled ‘civilizations’ is our finding that each of 
them constitutes, in itself, an intelligible field of study. 1 Whereas the 
parochial communities into which most of these civilizations were 
articulated at some stages of their histories prove to have shared their 
main historical experiences with most of the other parochial communi¬ 
ties comprised within the same society, so that the history of any single 
parochial community is intelligible only in the setting of the history of 
the whole society in whose life it has been a participant, the history of 
each of these larger social units, the civilizations, proves, by contrast, to 
be more or less intelligible in itself, because each civilization, in so far 
as it has met with the typical specific experiences of the species of which 
it is one representative, will be found to have met with them in circum¬ 
stances, in places, and at dates that were peculiar to its own history, so 
that these episodes can be studied and comprehended in isolation from 
the corresponding experiences in the histories of other civilizations. 

It is true that, where we have a pair of civilizations—for instance the 
Muslim pair or the Christian pair—in which the two sister civilizations 
are both affiliated to one and the same antecedent society, each of the 
two may prove to have emerged at approximately the same date from 
the intervening social interregnum; but, thereafter, even when the two 
sister civilizations are conjuring up ‘renaissances’ of elements in the life 
of their dead common parent, we shall find 2 that they are each apt to 
revive different elements of this common heritage in response to different 
challenges, and we have already found that their histories arc apt to 
follow equally independent and distinctive courses in other respects. 

For example, the main body of the Orthodox Christian Society broke 
down, on our interpretation of its history, at a date signalized by the 
outbreak of the Great Romano-Bulgarian War of a.d. 977-1019, i.c. at 
a date before the Russian offshoot of the Orthodox Christian Society had 
yet been planted out. This means that the breakdown of this Russian 
Orthodox Christendom, whatever date we may assign to it, must, ex 
hypothesis have been later than the date of the breakdown of the main 
body of Orthodox Christendom, and must therefore have occurred in 
different circumstances, as well as in a different geographical theatre; 
and, when we go on to ask ourselves about the breakdown of the sister 
Western Christian Civilization, we shall find ourselves unable, on the 
historical evidence forthcoming midway through the twentieth century 
of the Christian Era, to certify that, by that date, the experience of 
breakdown had yet overtaken a long since broken-down Orthodox 
Christendom’s Western sister. It was certain, at any rate, in the year 

* See 1 . i. 17-50, cited on p. 88, above. 2 In X. ix. x—x 66. 



668 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
a.d. 1952 that the Western Society had not yet entered into a universal 
state, whereas by that date each of the two Orthodox Christian societies 
had not only entered into a universal state of its own but had already 
passed out of this again—if we arc right in seeing the universal state of 
the main body of Orthodox Christendom in the Ottoman Empire and 
the universal state of the Russian offshoot of Orthodox Christendom in 
the Muscovite Empire. 

If these historical findings are correct, they warrant our practice of 
treating our twenty-one or twenty-three units as so many distinct 
representatives of one and the same species of society for the purpose of 
studying some, at least, of this species’ specific experiences. We have 
found, for instance, that this practice has justified itself, by proving to 
answer to the historical facts, in our study of the geneses, growths, and 
breakdowns of civilizations and in our study of encounters between con¬ 
temporaries, and we shall find it justifying itself again, on the same 
empirical test, when we come to study the renaissances of elements of 
the cultures of antecedent civilizations. Moreover, in our study of insti¬ 
tutions generated in the course of the disintegrations of civilizations, we 
have found that each of our units can be treated as an intelligible field in 
itself for a study of the universal states established by dominant minori¬ 
ties 1 and a study of the war-bands mustered by the transfrontier 
barbarians. 2 On the other hand we have found that, in studying the 
recruitment of internal proletariats and the epiphanies of higher reli¬ 
gions within their bosom in the histories of the disintegrations of civiliza¬ 
tions of the second generation, the confines of a single civilization no 
longer afford us an intelligible field of study for the purpose here in view. 
For this purpose, we have had to expand our historical horizon by taking 
cognizance of contacts or encounters between two or more civilizations 
that have been one another’s contemporaries. 

In finding this we are, of course, simply finding—as we should indeed 
have expected a priori —that the range of the intelligible field of historical 
study is not the same for all purposes but varies in accordance with the 
nature of the object that is being studied in each case. Each different 
historical object will be found to have a specific field of its own, with a 
specific range that is the optimum for the study of this particular object; 
and all that we arc claiming for the twenty-one or twenty-three units 
with which we have operated in Parts I-VI and in Part VIII of this 
Study, as well as in the present Part IX, and with which we shall operate 

K ‘ 1 in Part X, is that these prove to be intelligible fields for the study 
e geneses, growths, and breakdowns of civilizations, for the study 
of universal states and barbarian war-bands, for the study of encounters 
between contemporaries, and for the study of renaissances. We do claim 
that, for these purposes, it is both correct and illuminating to treat these 
units as so many distinct members of one and the same species of society; 
but, in claiming this, we arc not claiming that our units are necessarily 
all on a par with one another in other respects. 

Supposing, for example, that we were studying, not the experiences 
of civilizations, but their heritages from the Past, then manifestly, for 
« See VI. vii. 1-379- * Sec pp. 1-87, above. 




RELATIVITY OF UNITS OF CLASSIFICATION 669 
the purpose of that study, the relation between the three ‘Hellenistic’ 
Christian civilizations or between the two ‘Syriastic’ Muslim civiliza¬ 
tions or between the two ‘Sinistic’ Far Eastern civilizations would not 
be found to be on a par with the relation between, let us say, a ‘Syriastic’ 
Iranic Muslim civilization and an ‘Indistic’ Hindu civilization that had 
collided with one another, without coalescing, in India. For the particular 
purpose of studying heritages, we should begin by sorting out the 
mutual relations between our twenty-one or twenty-three units into 
two distinct classes: one class of relations in virtue of which the members 
of a pair or a trio of societies might be called one another’s 'sisters’, in 
virtue of their being affiliated, alike, to one and the same antecedent 
civilization, and another class of relations in which the parties were not 
linked with one another by any common heritage derived from one 
identical predecessor. In studying the heritages of the civilizations of the 
third generation, we should have to take account, not only of the antece¬ 
dent civilizations to which they were affiliated, but also of the churches 
that had served them as their chrysalises; and, for this purpose, we might 
find ourselves reducing the number of our units in this generation 
from eight to two, namely one great society—comprising the three 
Christian and the two Muslim civilizations—which had derived its 
religious inspiration and acquired its moral ethos mainly from Judaism, 
and a second great society, comprising the Hindu Civilization and the 
two Far Eastern civilizations, whose religious inspiration and moral 
ethos could be traced back in some part to Buddhism. The spiritual 
affinity between the Judaistic Muslim hero the Mahdi Muhammad 
Ahmad and his adversary the Judaistic Christian hero General Charles 
George Gordon would leap to the eye of a Buddhist monk or a Con- 
fucian philosopher, while conversely a Muslim or a Christian observer 
would perceive the spiritual affinity between an Indistic Hindu sanyasi 
and an Indistic Japanese practitioner of the Zen discipline of Mahayan- 
ian Buddhism. 

These considerations seemed to the writer of this Study to suggest 
the answer to a pertinent and trenchant criticism, by Prince Dmitri 
Obolensky, of the writer’s classification of the main body of Orthodox 
Christendom, the offshoot of Orthodox Christendom in Russia, and the 
Western Society as three separate civilizations. 

‘The picture we shall have of Byzantium and the Mediaeval West,’ 
Prince Obolensky writes in his critique of this classification, 'will be of 
two different but closely interwoven halves of one Graeco-Roman Christ¬ 
ian and European civilisation.' Neither half, on this reading, was in any 
real sense a self-contained unit or a fully "intelligible field of historical 
study”, at least until the fifteenth century. . . . From the eighteenth ccn- 

* The same view of the relation between these two Christendoms was expressed by 
B. H. Sumner, the late Warden of All Souls College, Oxford, in a letter of the 25th 
January, 1051, to the writer of this Study: 

‘Where I differ, with great hesitation, from you is in regarding Western Christendom 
and Eastern Christendom as [being] sufficiently close to each other to be grouped to¬ 
gether. I look upon them as, on the whole, one Christendom, or one "West , with two 
facets.* 

B. H. Sumner’s view is expounded in a paper on ‘Russia and Europe’ in Oxford 
Slavonic Papers, vol. ii (Oxford 1951, Clarendon Press), pp. 1-16.—A.J.T. 



670 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
tury. . . . Russia’s Byzantine heritage, overlaid with influences from the 
contemporary West, ceased to be the primary source of Russian culture, 
and the "intelligible field” of Russian history in this period should be 
widened to include the greater part of Europe. In any case the realm of 
Byzantine Civilisation, which in geographico-cultural terms can, both in 
mediaeval and (in] modem times, be largely described as Eastern Europe, 
was never a self-contained unit, but should be regarded as an integral 
part of European Christendom.’ 1 

In so far as Prince Obolensky’s criterion, in this paper, for his classifi¬ 
cation of civilizations is the presence or absence, in their heritages, of 
common legacies from antecedent civilizations, the writer of this Study 
would not only agree that, for this purpose, three of the units which, in 
this Study, have been distinguished from one another for a different 
purpose could and should be treated as so many parts of a single more 
comprehensive unit; he would go on to submit that, for the purpose of 
classifying societies by their heritages, if the criterion of unity or 
separateness is to be their participation or their non-participation in a 
dual heritage from both Hellenism on the one hand and Christianity on 
the other, then the ambit of Prince Obolensky’s ‘one Graeco-Roman 
Christian and European Civilization’ must be extended, as has been 
suggested above, to include the present writer’s two Muslim civiliza¬ 
tions as w-ell—considering that Islam originated as a Christian heresy 2 
and that thereafter, in the 'Abbasid Age, Islam followed Christianity’s 
example in receiving into itself the heritage of Hellenism in the two 
intellectual provinces of Philosophy and Science 5 and worked out for 
itself a Hellenistic Islamic theology on the pattern of the Hellenistic 
Christian theology previously worked out by the Greek Fathers of the 
Christian Church. The Muslims cannot be ruled out of membership in 
a society for which the certificate of membership is a participation in 
both the Christian and the Hellenic heritage; and, though their inclusion 
requires the abandonment of Prince Obolensky’s geographical limitation 
of his Graeco-Roman Christian Civilization to the confines of Europe, 
this limitation cannot in any case be maintained unless Orthodox 
Christendom, as well as Dar-al-Islam, is excluded, considering that the 
cradle of the Orthodox Christian Civilization lay on the Asiatic side of 
the Black Sea Straits, in Asia Minor. 4 Indeed, even Western Christen¬ 
dom could hardly be claimed as a product of Europe, considering the 
importance, in its life and thought, of the influence of Latin Fathers 
whose home was North-West Africa. 

On the other hand, for the purposes of studying the geneses, growths, 
and breakdowns of civilizations and the histories of universal states, 
barbarian war-bands, encounters between contemporaries and renais¬ 
sances, a unitary Hcllcno-Christian ‘great society’ is not, in the present 
writer’s view, an effective or an illuminating unit for the conduct of 
intellectual operations. These seven lines of study can be pursued, in his 
view, with better chances of success if, for these purposes, an Helleno- 

* Obolensky, D.: 'Russia’s Byzantine Heritage’, in Oxjord Slavonic Papers , vol. i 
(Oxford 1950, Clarendon Press), pp. 53 and 56. 

* See V. v. 230, n. 4, and p. 347, above. 

1 See p. 408, with n. 5, above. 4 See I. i. 63—64; II. ii. 79; and p. 726-7, below. 



RELATIVITY OF UNITS OF CLASSIFICATION 67x 
Christian monolith is dissected into five separate civilizations. These 
smaller units seemed to the writer to be indicated for these purposes 
because an empirical inquiry showed—so it appeared to him—that, in so 
far as these experiences had been met with in the histories of these five 
units up to date, each unit had had its own separate experience of 
genesis, growth, and breakdown, had generated its own separate universal 
states and war-bands, had had its own separate encounters with con¬ 
temporaries, and had evoked its own separate renaissances, whereas he 
could not recall a single case in which any of these experiences had been 
shared by all the five units in question. So far from that, it appeared to 
him that the experience of passing through a universal state, which had 
already overtaken the two Orthodox Christian civilizations, had not yet 
overtaken the Western Civilization or either of the two Muslim civiliza¬ 
tions. If this diagnosis was correct, it seemed to follow that the study of 
universal states could not be illuminated, but could only be obscured, by 
operating with the Helleno-Christian civilizations as the single unit that 
would be the key to a successful intellectual operation when the objects 
of study were, not experiences, but heritages. 

It seemed to the writer that the five smaller units were decidedly more 
efficient keys than the single monolithic unit when the object of study 
was the historical phenomenon of encounters in the Space-dimension 
between civilizations that were contemporary with one another. The 
frequency and intimacy of the encounters between the three non- 
Muslim Helleno-Christian societies had been taken by Prince Obolensky 
as a sign that in truth these were, not three societies, but one society. In 
the second of the two passages quoted above he adduces the penetration 
of Russia by cultural influences radiating from the Modern West as 
evidence that, in this chapter of history at least, Russia and the West 
ought to be regarded as being provinces of one single cultural realm, and 
in the sequel to the first passage of the two he similarly adduces the 
penetration of a Medieval Western Christendom by cultural influences 
radiating from Byzantium as evidence that Byzantium and the Medieval 
West ought to be regarded as being ‘two different but closely interwoven 
halves of one Graeco-Roman Christian and European civilization.’ 

‘If,* he continues, ‘we were inclined to doubt the truth of this inter¬ 
pretation, we have only to think how much will remain unintelligible in 
the mediaeval history of Western and Central Europe unless we consider 
the Byzantine contributions to its culture: Anglo-Saxon scholarship of the 
eighth century, the Carolingian art of the ninth, Otto Ill’s restoration of 
the Roman Empire, the growth of the Norman Kingdom of Sicily, the 
cultural aftermath of the Crusades, the Italian Renaissance, these and 
other important events of European history cannot be understood without 
reference to Eastern Europe. The Basilica of St. Mark in Venice, the Art 
of Giotto and El Greco, are these not eloquent signs of how much the 
Western World owed to the genius of Byzantium?’ 1 

Indisputably they are; but are they not also signs that the body social 
which was the recipient of this cultural radiation was a separate and 
a different entity from the body by which the radiation was emitted ? 

• Obolensky, op. cit., p. 53. 



672 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

For, when we turn our attention from the impact of Byzantium on the 
Medieval West to the impact of the Modern West on its contemporaries, 
we find parallels to all the phenomena cited by Prince Obolensky from 
the history of the encounter between Byzantium and the Medieval West 
in the relations between the Modern West and three Buddhaistic 
societies—the Hindu, the Far Eastern in China, and the Far Eastern in 
Korea and Japan—which neither Prince Obolensky nor any other 
student of history would be likely to classify, in virtue of these relations, 
as being so many subdivisions of a single all-embracing civilization in 
which the Western Civilization was likewise to be reckoned as being 
included. 

The inspiration of eighth-century Anglo-Saxon scholarship and ninth- 
century Carolingian art by the genius of Byzantium has its counterpart 
in the inspiration of nineteenth-century Bengali scholarship and 
twentieth-century Bengali art by the genius of the Modern West. Otto 
Ill’s restoration of the Roman Empire in Byzantine dress has its counter¬ 
part in the restoration of the Mughal Raj in Western dress by the British 
East India Company. The establishment of a Norman successor-state 
of the East Roman Empire in Sicily is matched by the establishment, 
in a.d. 1947, of three Asian successor-states of the British Raj in India: 
Pakistan, the Indian Union, and Burma. The cultural aftermath of the 
Crusades in Western Christendom has its counterpart in the cultural 
aftermath, in the Ottoman Muslim World, of the 'Osmanlis’ likewise 
temporarily victorious jihads against the Christendoms (if we may allow 
ourselves to cite this one example from the history of the relations 
between the Modem West and an Islamic Civilization that shared with 
the West its Helleno-Christian heritage). The Byzantine contribution to 
the Italian renaissance of an Hellenic literary culture consisted in initiat¬ 
ing the fifteenth-century Italian humanists into the Greek originals of 
Roman copyists’ Latin imitations through which the Italian Humanists 
had previously been cultivating Hellenism at second hand; 1 and, in the 
history of the impact of the Modern West upon the Hindu World, this 
Byzantine sendee to the Italian Humanists has its counterpart in the 
initiation of nineteenth-century and twentieth-century Hindu pandits 
into a scientific study of Sanskrit by the Western pioneers in the science 
of the comparative study of the Indo-European languages. The imprint 
of Byzantium on the Basilica of St. Mark in Venice has its counterpart 
in the imprint of the Italian Renaissance on the Taj Mahall at Agra. 
The Byzantine motifs in the art of Giotto and El Greco have their 
counterparts in the Western motifs in the art of a twentieth-century 
Japan. 

On this showing, the evidences of the penetration of Western Christen¬ 
dom by the radiation of Byzantine cultural influences would seem, in the 
present writer’s eyes, to indicate, not that Byzantium and the Medieval 
West were provinces of one and the same cultural realm, but rather that 
they were two distinct societies whose relations were on a par with those 
between a Modern Western Society and its contemporaries in India and 
the Far East. 


See IV. iv. 27s, n. x, and 363, n. 1; and X. ix. 63. 



RELATIVITY OF UNITS OF CLASSIFICATION 673 
As the present writer saw it, however, the lesson to be learnt from Prince 
Obolensky’s critique of the writer’s classification of civilizations was not 
that cither the writer’s own classification or Prince Obolensky’s alter¬ 
native classification was right or wrong in any absolute or universal 
sense. The lesson appeared to be that all such classifications, analyses, 
and dissections were keys which were useful in so far as they served the 
practical purpose of opening locks. Any one of them would have been 
proved to be a genuine key if it did effectively unlock a door; and some 
of these keys were good for opening more doors than one; but there did 
not seem to be any master key that rendered all its fellow keys superfluous 
by unlocking all doors alike; and therefore a resourceful researcher who 
had been moved by his curiosity to explore the wonderland of History 
would keep on adding to the bunch of keys on his key-ring. Whenever 
he ran into a closed door barring the way to further progress in his 
intellectual quest, his first recourse would be to try whether any of the 
keys already on his ring would turn this next door’s lock; but, if none of 
them proved to fit, he would neither try to force the door nor despair of 
succeeding in opening it, but would set about casting a new key to fit a 
lock that had been proved by experiment to be one of a novel structure. 



IX. B (ii) (a) I, ANNEX I 

THE ROLE OF TECHNOLOGICAL COMPETI¬ 
TION IN THE WESTERNIZATION OF RUSSIA 


The part played in the Westernization of Russia by a spontaneous 
response to the appeal of the Modem Western culture, as contrasted 
with a reluctant capitulation to a recognized necessity of adopting 
Western weapons for the purpose of keeping the West at bay, is under¬ 
lined in the following note by Prince D. Obolensky: 

'I would say that to describe the relations between Russia and the 
Modem West solely, or mainly, in terms of a technological race between 
a rapidly expanding Western military and economic technique and a 
Russian resistance to the resultant menace of military conquest or cultural 
absorption would be to paint only part of the picture. It is, of course, true 
that Peter’s reforms were primarily dictated by military considerations and 
by Russia’s need, in order to maintain and improve her military and 
political status as a great European power, to "catch up’’ with the econo¬ 
mically more advanced West. Moreover, I would agree, up to a point, that 
the Westernizing movement among the educated minority of the Ortho¬ 
dox population of Western Russia in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen¬ 
turies found its raison d'etre in the policy of resisting encroachments of 
the West (i.e. of the Roman Catholic Church) by adopting Western wea¬ 
pons (i.c. from Catholicism and Protestantism). But... I would say that 
this Westernising movement, not only in the Ukraine but in Muscovy as 
well, was due just as much to a genuine belief held by some of its leaders 
in the superiority of the contemporary Western culture, and to their 
desire to imitate Western habits and institutions because they were good 
in themselves. This is surely true of such outstanding statesmen and 
diplomatists of the second half of the seventeenth century as Ordin- 
Nashchokin and Prince V. Galitsin, who pursued a policy of ‘‘selective 
Westernisation”.’ 

On the other hand it is surely also true that Peter the Great himself, 
spiritual ‘changeling’ though he was in his native Muscovite cultural 
environment, was an anima naturaliter Occidentals only in the narrowly 
limited sense of having a gift and a passion for the contemporary 
Western World’s technology. We have noticed in another context 1 that 
this technological approach of his was distasteful to cultivated Westerners 
of that age—for example, Bishop Burnet and King William III—who 
had not been broken in to a future Industrial Age of Western Civiliza¬ 
tion in which this exotic young barbarian man of genius was already 
living by anticipation; and, though Peter’s genius was so great that he 
soon became aware of the necessity of broadening his approach if he 
was to succeed in attaining his primary technological objective, his 
spontaneous appetite for the non-technological elements in the Western 
Civilization always remained comparatively feeble except in so far as it 
was whetted by a partially enlightened view of the requirements of a 
technological utilitarianism. 


» In III. iii. 279. 



TECHNOLOGY AND WESTERNIZATION IN RUSSIA 67s 

Within the province of Technology, Peter did give proof, as soon as 
military necessity allowed, of a spontaneous impulse to extend the range 
of his Westernizing policy from the manufacture of Western weapons 
to the manufacture of Western non-military commodities. 

‘Between a.d. 1695 and a.d. 1709 nearly three-quarters of the new 
manufactories were state works, and nearly all of them were designed for 
military and naval needs. Between 1710 and 1725 the picture changes, as 
the needs of war become rather less absorbing. The new works in his later 
years were far less concentrated on military needs; silk, velvet, and ribbon 
manufactories were started; china, glass, and brickworks made their 
appearance. A number of the state factories were handed over to private 
operation, and Peter pressed forward the opening of new works by in¬ 
dividuals or companies, granting them important exemptions and 
privileges’. 1 

In thus becoming less exclusively military, Peter’s Westernizing 
activities did not, however, become less utilitarian—as is shown by the 
persistent utilitarianism of his educational policy; 2 and, though, here 
too, the scope of the Westernizing movement in Russia broadened 
rapidly after Peter’s death, this subsequent progress of Russia’s cultural 
Westernization beyond the limits of military or even civil utilitarian 
requirements seems to have been due, not so much to a Russian ‘desire 
to imitate Western habits and institutions because they were good in 
themselves’, as to the operation of a cultural ‘law’ 1 that, in any encounter 
between contemporaries, a single element of a radioactive alien culture, 
when once admitted into a recipient society’s body social, tends to draw 
in after it other elements of the same alien culture-pattern. 

* Sumner, B. H.: Peter the Great and the Emergence of Russia (London 1930, English 
Universities Press), p. 166. 

* See pp. 554-7, above. 1 Examined on pp. 542-64, above. 



IX. B (ii) (a) I, ANNEX II 

THE BYZANTINE INSPIRATION OF THE 
RUSSIAN POLITICAL ETHOS 

In the first draft of the chapter to which this Annex attaches, the writer 
assumed that the autocratic regime that was built up in Muscovy in and 
after the fourteenth century of the Christian Era had drawn its inspira¬ 
tion from the Byzantine political tradition; but the comments on this 
draft which he received from B. H. Sumner 1 and from Prince D. 
Obolensky convinced him that the Muscovite political institutions 
which took shape during the period of Mongol ascendancy over Eastern 
Russia were, for the most part, home-grown responses to the challenge 
of pressure from alien civilizations on two fronts: from a Eurasian 
Nomad Society on the south-east and from a Western Christian Society 
on the north-west. At the same time the historical evidence still seemed 
to the writer to indicate that the political climate of a Russian Orthodox 
Christendom, in which a home-grown Muscovite autocracy had found 
so favourable an environment for establishing itself, had been pre¬ 
dominantly Byzantine in its origin. 

One consequence of the supremacy which a resuscitated Imperial 
Regime had established over the Orthodox Christian Church within the 
frontiers of the East Roman Empire in the course of the eighth, ninth, 
and tenth centuries of the Christian Era 1 had been that, when a hitherto 
independent pagan state received Christianity from the East Roman 
Church, it could not place itself under the ecclesiastical authority of the 
Oecumenical Patriarch at Constantinople without thereby implicitly 
acknowledging the political sovereignty of the Oecumenical Patriarch’s 
secular lord and master the East Roman Emperor. 1 This political impli¬ 
cation of conversion to Orthodox Christianity was, as we have seen, the 
cause of a war to the death between the East Roman Empire and a con¬ 
verted Bulgaria that was responsible for the breakdown of the main 
body of Orthodox Christendom in the very generation in which Russia 
was entering the Orthodox Christian fold. This juridical consequence of 
conversion was in practice much less serious for the Russians than it had 
been for the Bulgarians, because Russia, instead of lying, as Bulgaria 
lay, on Byzantium’s threshold, was insulated from the East Roman 
Empire by the double barrier of the Black Sea and the Eurasian Steppe; 4 
and the princes of Kiev and her successor-states, including Muscovy, 
appear to have acquiesced, with only a few symptoms of restiveness, in 
the East Roman Empire’s pretension to a political supremacy over the 
Oecumenical Patriarchate’s Russian ecclesiastical subjects throughout 
the period of more than four centuries’ length that elapsed between the 
enthronement of Thcdpcmptos, the first Greek Metropolitan of Kiev, 
in a.d. 1039 and the extinction of the last remnants of the East Roman 
Empire by the 'Osmanlis in a.d. 1453-61. 5 

« See VI. vii. 577-9. » Sec IV. iv. 592-612. * See IV. iv. 377. 

« Sec p. 152, n. 6, above. s See pp. 399-400, above. 



RUSSIA’S BYZANTINE POLITICAL ETHOS 677 

The fourtcenth-cenlury rulers of Muscovy’, Prince Obolensky observes 
in a note on the present writer’s first draft, ‘continued to acknowledge, at 
least in theory, the quasi-religious sovereignty of the Byzantine Emperors, 
whose oecumenical authority and legislative power were still recognised 
in Russia in the fifteenth century: thus, for example, the Emperor John VI 
Cantacuzenus wrote to the Grand Prince Symeon of Moscow (Jungebatur 
a . d . 1340-53): “Yes, the Empire of the Romans and the most holy and 
great Church of God are, as you have written, the source of all piety and 
the school of law and sanctification”. And the Grand Prince Basil II of 
Moscow (fungebatur a.d. 1425-62), writing to the Emperor after the Coun¬ 
cil of Florence, calls him “the pious and holy autocrat of the whole 
Universe”.’ 

Considering that the juridical sovereignty of the East Roman Empire 
was thus acknowledged by Russian princes, including the latter-day 
Grand Dukes of Muscovy, over a Time-span of more than four centuries, 
it is hardly credible that the political 6thos, as distinct from the adminis¬ 
trative institutions, of a Russian Orthodox Christendom should not 
have been deeply influenced by the political 6thos of ‘the Second Rome’; 
and W. Wcidlc is surely right in stating, in his brilliant Russie Absente et 
Pr (sente ,' that ‘les conceptions politiques investies dans l’ancien Etat 
moscovite 6taicnt de provenance byzantine’. 

By contrast, die ethos, as well as the institutional structure, of a post- 
Muscovitc Petrine autocracy in Russia was manifestly derived from 
a contemporary Western World, and the writer would agree with Prince 
Obolensky’s view ‘that Peter’s “enlightened autocracy" owes far more 
to contemporary Western models than to any Byzantine prototype’, and 
that ‘Peter’s ecclesiastical reform, which led to the partial subjection of 
the Russian Church to the Imperial power in the eighteenth and nine¬ 
teenth centuries and to the breakdown of that relationship between the 
spiritual and temporal powers which Medieval Russia had inherited 
from Byzantium, was based on Western Lutheran, not East Roman, 
models.’ The writer of this Study would, however, go on to point out 
that this seventeenth-century Western ‘enlightened autocracy’ proves, 
on a scrutiny of its origins, not to have been a native Western product; 
for its lineage can be traced back through the Late Medieval North 
Italian despots to the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily, Frederick 
II Hohenstaufen; through Frederick to the Norman founders of a 
Sicilian and Apulian successor-state of the East Roman Empire; and 
through them to the East Roman Empire itself. 2 

The writer would also venture to suggest an amendment to Prince 
Obolensky’s view that ‘the notion of a purely secular state, regarded as 
the source of all authority and legislation and the ultimate object of 
men’s loyalty, and in which the clergy are no more than civil servants 
whose very spiritual authority is delegated to them by the Government, 
would, from the Byzantine view-point, have seemed a strange aberra¬ 
tion.’ On the writer’s interpretation of the Byzantine Weltanschauung, it 
would indeed have seemed to a Byzantine critic strangely naive, in¬ 
elegant, and impolitic, to the point of being shocking, for an East Roman 

1 Pnris X 949 . Gallimard, p. 73. quoted on p. 395, above. 

* See III. Hi. 300-x, 305, and 354-63: IV. »v. 198-200; and pp. 363 and 395, above. 



678 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
statesman to claim in so many words—as a Western Frederick II and 
his eventual Lutheran successors were to stake their claim—that the 
Secular Power was the source of spiritual as well as temporal authority; 
but assuredly it would also have seemed, in Byzantine eyes, no less 
strangely incompetent and irresponsible for the secular Power to refrain 
from exercising de facto an effective control over the Church which, 
until the East Roman Empire fell on evil days, was always within an 
East Roman Emperor’s grasp so long as he took care not to commit the 
gross Frankish Frcderician indiscretion of publicly laying claim to this 
‘totalitarian’ authority de jure. 


IX. B (ii) (a) 2, ANNEX I 

THE CONFLICT OF CULTURES IN THE SOUL 
OF SOLOM 0 S 1 

The career of the conventional Italian poet Dionisio Salomone, who 
became the original Greek poet Dhionysios Solomds, is one of the 
curiosities of the history of the transmission of culture. His genius found 
its opportunity for making its literary fortune thanks to the lucky acci¬ 
dent of his being the bastard son, by a Zantiot Greek servant-girl, 
of a Zantiot landowner—Venetian in culture and origin, though 
Orthodox in religion—who, on his death-bed, married Dionisio’s 
mother and left Dionisio and his brother handsome shares of his estate. 
At the age of ten, Dionisio was sent by his guardian to Italy for his 
education, and he remained there for ten years on end (a.d. 1808-18), 
first at Venice, then at Cremona, and finally at the Venetian university 
of Padua. During these years in Italy he received a thorough schooling 
in Italian and Latin literature; made friends with Monti, Manzoni, and 
other Italian men of letters; and became a disciple of the Western 
Romantic movement. After his return to Zantc he joined an aristocratic 
Italianate literary circle there whose parlour-game was the extemporiza¬ 
tion of sonnets in Italian on some given subject or given set of line- 
endings ; and there seemed no reason why he should not end his days in 
this conventionally cultivated obscurity. 

Solombs found his true metier when, after the outbreak of the Otto¬ 
man Greek insurrection in a.d. 1821, a Mesolonghiot patriot-publicist, 
Spiridhibn Trikodpis, visited him in Zante at his country villa in a.d. 
1822 and invited him to become the Dante of a Greek Parnassus. ‘I 
don’t know Greek’, Solomos replied, meaning that he had never been 
taught the Byzantine ecclesiastical Attic koinS. ‘The language which you 
imbibed with your mother’s milk is Greek’, Trikodpis retorted, meaning 
that Solombs could have communicated with his low-born mother in 
no other tongue than her Zantiot Romaic Greek patois. Thereupon 
Solombs sprang into fame by composing in this mother tongue of his, in 
Italian metres, Western poetry, first in Byron’s vein and later in Schiller’s. 
Thanks to his being a Heptanesian aristocrat, Solombs was a highly 
cultivated man who did speak one of the dialects of living Greek as his 
mother tongue without knowing the dead language. In the early nine¬ 
teenth century the Ionian Islands were perhaps the only place in Greek 
Orthodox Christendom where this could have happened, and the com¬ 
position of Western poetry in living Greek—without murdering the 
language by trying to transform it into a resurrected Attic—was 
Solombs’ inestimably valuable service to a new Greek nation that was 
seeking to enter the Western comity. 

Solomos’ work suffered, nevertheless, from another form of pedantry 
that was likewise inimical to poetry. His method of composing a 
Romaic Greek poem was to take Italian notes, expand these into Greek 

* See Jenkins, R.: Dionysius Solom 6 s (Cambridge 1940, University Pres*). 



6So ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
prose, and then hammer this prose into verse! And in his latter years, 
when his mental vigour was on the decline, he relapsed into writing his 
poetry in the Italian which, in spite of his Romaic Greek tours deforce, 
was, from first to last, his natural medium of literary expression. More¬ 
over, his invincible native Westernism, which made him so effective a 
psychopompus for Greek souls seeking initiation into the Western cul¬ 
ture, also inhibited him from going out to meet his Ottoman fcllpw 
Greek Orthodox Christians in deed as well as in word. When, on the eve 
of the fall of Mesol6nghi, just across the water, the cannonade bombarded 
his ears in his peaceful villa on Zante, he suffered anguish but did not 
seek relief by going to the front in defiance of British regulations; and, 
though he lived on for a quarter of a century after a fragment of the 
Ottoman Empire had been transformed into a sovereign independent 
Kingdom of Greece with its capital at Athens, he preferred to end his 
days at Corfu under a British regime. 

'In the days when I was young’, wrote the Moreot klepht Koloko- 
tr« 5 nis, who had taken refuge on Zante in a.d. 1806, ‘Zante seemed as far 
away as the ends of the Earth do now. What America is to us now— that 
is pretty well what Zante was to them [i.e. to the fin-de-siecle Moreot 
Ottoman Greeks]. When they went to Zante, they called it ‘‘going to the 
Western World” (“Phrangid”)’. 1 Solombs’ career testifies that, in the feel¬ 
ings of a Zantiot aristocrat who was younger than KolokotrtSnis by the 
span of a whole generation, an adjacent ex-Ottoman Morca was still the 
alter orbis that an adjacent ex-Venetian Zante had been to the Moreot 
klepht in days before Solombs was bom. 

! Kolokotrdnis, Th: dirfoois ZvpflavToiv rns 'EXXijvik^s QvXfjs, Z770-1S36 (Athens 
1889, Esti», 2 vols.), vol. i, p. 49, quoted in V. V. 301. 



IX. B (ii) (a) 2, ANNEX II 

THE MOREA ON THE EVE OF THE UPRISING 
OF A.D. 1821 

In a.d. 1821 the eyalet of the Morea did not include the Mani, which, 
since a.d. 1776, had been under the jurisdiction, not of the Vail of the 
Morea, but of the Qapudan Pasha. On the eve of the uprising of a.d. 
1821 the population of the eyalet, excluding the Mani from the reckon¬ 
ing, is estimated to have been about 400,000, of whom about 360,000 
were Greek and Albanian Orthodox Christians and about 40,000 were 
Turkish and Albanian Muslims. 1 The Turkish Muslim Moreots were 
concentrated in the towns: Corinth, Navplia, Mistra, Monemvasia, 
K6ron, Navarino, Arkadhik, Pdtras, Phansiri, Leonddri, Gastuni, 
Mddhon. The populations of Ndvplia, Kdron, Modhon, and Navarino 
were exclusively Muslim; those of Tripolitsa and Corinth were mixed 
in approximately equal proportions. Except in these two last-mentioned 
towns, the Christians, where there was a Christian element in the urban 
population, lived in separate quarters from the Muslims. 2 

At the same date about three-quarters of the agricultural land in the 
Morea is estimated to have been in the hands of the Muslim 10 per cent, 
of the population, and only one quarter in the hands of the Christian 
90 per cent.: 417 per cent, of the land was accounted for by Imperial 
Ottoman fiefs, which were, of course, conferred on Muslim fcofccs; 
another 25 per cent, was accounted for by Muslim privately owned real 
estate; and the remaining 33.3 per cent, by Christian privately owned 
real estate. 3 The Muslim, as well as the Christian, estates were, however, 
cultivated by Christian tenants and hired labourers, who were at liberty 
to change their employers; 4 and the Christians, including labourers and 
tenants as well as freeholders, are estimated to have received 87-5 per 
cent, of the annual value of the agricultural produce, as against 12-5 per 
cent, received by the Muslims, who thus took only about 25 per cent, 
more than what would have fallen to them under a strictly proportional 
allocation. 3 

It will be seen that the economic conditions in the Morea between 
a.d. 1715 and a.d. 1821 were not seriously inequitable, and during the 
same century the administrative arrangements were remarkably favour¬ 
able to the Orthodox Christian population or (it would be more accurate 
to say) to an Orthodox Christian oligarchy. 6 A system of local self- 
government, dating from the preceding period of Venetian occupation, 
had been maintained in the Morea after the Ottoman reconquest; and 
this self-government was not confined to the communes but extended to 
the departments ( Turcice qazos; Graece iirapxuu) and to the province 
(Turcid eyalet) as a whole. 7 In each commune the aldermen ( Turcici 

« Sec Sakellarios, M. V.: 'H IJeXonoivtjoos Kara -rr.y divrlpav TovoKOKparlav, 
171S-1S21 (Athens 1939, Byzantinisch-Neugriechische Jahrbilcher), p. 226. 

* Sec ibid., pp. 118-19. J Sec ibid., p. 49. * See ibid., p. 51. 

s Sec ibid., p. S 3 * 4 Sec ibid., p. 95. 7 Sec ibid., p. 87. 

Z 2 


B iSOS.vm 



682 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
kh 6 ja-b 3 sh?s; Graece hrjpxtylpovres) were elected annually,' and these in 
turn elected the Christian members (Graeci TrpoforujTts) of the council 
of the voyevoda of the department, who in their turn, again, collectively 
constituted a provincial assembly which elected the two Christian 
members (Graed pwpayidv&fs) of the vSlI’s permanent council of five 
members including, besides the two Christian deputies, two Muslims 
and one Christian dragoman. 2 Moreover, the Greek Orthodox Christian 
community in the Morea had two or three political agents (vekils) ac¬ 
credited to the Porte at Constantinople. 3 

‘It can be said that [the departmental Tpoearwres] shared the ad¬ 
ministrative power with the voyevoda and the judicial with the qadi. 
They concentrated so much power in their hands that they were able 
fearlessly to hold their own against the Turkish authorities on their own 
level. Without their assent, no taxation could be imposed either for local 
or for general purposes. They were able to refuse to carry out orders of 
the voyevoda’s if they considered these inexpedient. ... If there were 
complaints against the voyevoda, and they had the qadi’s concurrence, 
they could proceed at once to depose the voyevoda, subject only to refer¬ 
ring their action retrospectively to the vezir [i.e. the vSli].’ 4 

Sakcllarios concludes 5 that ‘the TTpoeorusrcs were the real rulers of their 
department’. A Moreot Greek Orthodox Christian born in a.d. 1798 saw 
the Ottoman regime in the Morea in its last phase in a more jaundiced 
light that does not necessarily give a more objective picture: 

'The people appointed on their own initiative a headman (Trpwroytpos) or 
crier to carry out the general purposes of the commune and to give notice 
in the evening of any corv6e on behalf either of the commune or of the 
Government. This notice was cried in the following terms: "Oyez! 
Oycz! to-morrow no one is to go about his own private business, because 
we are going to do so and so”. Anyone who ignored the notice suffered 
for it; his neighbours wrecked his house; and, if he complained to the 
Government, the Government paid no attention—unless it were to punish 
him for insubordination . . . 

'In every large village, and sometimes in small ones, they had an aider- 
man ( ytpovras j or two aldermen, according to the size of the population, 
who, in collaboration with the priests, assessed the taxes imposed on the 
commune among its individual members in accordance with their 
means . . . 

'Whenever the potentate chose to oppress a town or a family, he would 
send a government official straight away and would demand whatever he 
chose, and the inhabitants, as I have said, would assess among themselves 
what was required, whether it was a money payment or some form of 
corv6e, through the agency of the aldermen. The Turks had to allow their 
raiyeh all these rights in order that they might prosper and be at the 
Turks’ disposal as slaves. On this account they looked after our well¬ 
being, and everyone among the raiyeh had some important Turk for a 
patron, while the whole commune in each town and village likewise had 

* See Sakellarios, op. cit., p. 88. 

2 See ibid., pp. 89-92; cp. Finlay, G.: A History of Greece from its Conquest by the 
Romans to the Present Time, B.C. 146 to A.D. 1864 (Oxford 1877, Clarendon Press, 
7 vols.), voL vi, p. 25. 

» See Sakellanos, op. cit., p. 94; Finlay, vol. vi, p. 25. 

♦ Sakcllarios, op. cit., p. 90. 


5 Sec ibid., p. 91. 



THE MOREA ON THE EVE OFa.d. 1S21 683 

some powerful patron for its own special preservation and protection. In 
the large towns, however, things were rather better, owing to their more 
advanced development.’ 1 

At the same time there was complete religious toleration in the Morea ; 2 
by the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the behaviour of 
the Moreot Muslims towards their Christian fellow Moreots had be¬ 
come less harsh, 3 and the Muslim Moreot minority was becoming 
assimilated in its culture to the Christian majority. The Moreot Turks 
spoke and wrote Greek, and even the 'ulema swore by Christ and by the 
Panayfa. 4 The Albanian Muslim Moreots, who were new-comers in a.d. 
1715, s were wilder and fiercer than their Turkish coreligionists; yet the 
Varduniots in their fastness in the Southern Taygctus and the Laliots 
and their neighbours at Phldka in their fastness on Pholoe all bore 
Christian as well as Muslim names. 6 Meanwhile the Moreot Greek 
Christian oligarchs betrayed their provincialism by continuing to culti¬ 
vate an Ottoman Muslim style of living which had long since been in 
process of being abandoned in favour of a Western style by the sophis¬ 
ticated metropolitan Phanariots. 

‘The khdja-bashy imitated the Turk in everything, including dress, 
manners, and household. His notion of living in style was the same as the 
Turk’s, and the only difference between them was one of names: for in¬ 
stance, instead of being called Hasan the khOja-bashy would be called 
Y£nni, and instead of going to mosque he would go to church. This was 
the only distinction between the two. All the same, the Turk would cut 
off the khoja-b5shy’s head whenever he chose, and keep his corpse ex¬ 
posed for three days in public, with the head placed by the backside as an 
additional humiliation, whereas the Turk’s head would be placed under 
his aim-pit. From these facts you will be able to judge whether the khbja- 
bashy was, or was not, a popularly elected magistrate.’ 7 

* Khrysanthopoulos, Ph. FPholAkoa]: Anofiwj/iOveiffiaTa vtpi rijs '.EAAijworiJJ ‘E-. rava- 
oraotoji (Athens 1899, Sakeltarios, a vols.), vol. i, pp. 34-37. 

* See Sakcllarios, op. cit., p. 120. 

3 See ibid., pp. 226-7. 

s See ibid., p. 117 . 

7 Khrysanth< 5 poulos, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 33-34. 


* See ibid., p. 227. 

6 See ibid., p. 120, n. 4. 



XX. B (u) (a) 3 , ANNEX I 

THE PEASANT MAJORITY OF MANKIND AND 
THE AGRARIAN POLICY OF THE SOVIET 

UNION 

To see the problem of a depressed peasantry in India in its true per¬ 
spective, we must extend our field of observation far beyond the Indian 
sub-continent’s limits; for this depressed peasantry in India was one 
contingent of an immense host of human beings in the same plight 
which, at the time of writing, still accounted for perhaps not less than 
three-quarters of the living generation of Mankind 1 and which was 
massed, not only in India, but in Indonesia, Indo-China, China, Japan, 
the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Egypt, and those superficially Latin¬ 
ized 'Indian American’ countries, from Mexico to Bolivia inclusive, 
which had inherited an indigenous peasantry from the submerged 
Central American and Andean civilizations. 1 

Could the condition of this vast and widespread rural depressed class 
be effectively improved by any orthodox devices of Modern Western 
democratic 'social engineering’? To be democratic in the Modern 
Western sense of the term, the solution of the problem must be one 
which could be introduced by consent, without having to be imposed by 
coercion; and it remained to be seen whether the peasantry, in its pre¬ 
vailing mood of self-assertiveness and expectancy not yet illuminated by 
more than a glimmer of intellectual enlightenment, would voluntarily 
agree to the things necessary for its economic salvation. The peasantry’s 
divers desires at this time seemed, indeed, likely to prove mutually in¬ 
compatible. The peasants now wanted an improvement in their material 
condition, but they also still wanted to go on living their customary life 
and using their traditional agricultural technique; and the ambition of 

1 According to E. M. Patterson, An Introduction to World Economics (New York 1047, 
Macmillan), p. 5, Table I, following and supplementing A. M. Carr-Saunders, World 
Population: Past Growths and Present Trends (London 1936, Oxford University Press), 
p. 42, ‘Europe’, including the whole of the Soviet Union, and North America, excluding 
Mexico, together contained 33-2 per cent, of the total population of the World in A.D. 
1938. To arrive at an approximate estimate of the respective percentages of non-peasants 
and peasants in the total population of the World at that date, we have to allow on the 
one side of the account for a small non-peasant minority in Asia, Africa, Oceania, and 
South and Central America, 8nd on the other side for a large peasant majority in the 
Soviet Union and in the adjacent countries of Eastern Europe. On this basis the ratio 
of the peasant element in the population of the World in a.d. 1938 would work out at 
something like 75 per cent.; and it would be still higher if calculated on the population 
estimates for mid-year a.d. 1950, given in the United Nations Demographic Year Book, 19 5 * 
(New York 1931, Statistical Office of the United Nations). The estimate, as at this 
date, for the aggregate population of the predominantly non-peasant parts of the World 
(the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Western Europe) amount to 
about 487,637,000, and those for the predominantly peasant remainder of Mankind to 
about 1,910,989,000; and, on this reckoning, the peasant element will have accounted 
for not much less than 80 per cent, of the World’s total population in a.d. 1950. 

* Paraguay, where a native American Indian population had been initiated into the 
arts of Civilization by Jesuit Roman Catholic Christian missionaries from the Old World, 
should be added to this list. The Jesuits’ achievements in Paraguay have been noticed on 
pp. 597-8, above. 



THE OECUMENICAL PEASANTRY AND RUSSIA 6S5 

every peasant household was not only to own a plot of land but to work 
its own plot as a separate unit of labour and production. Yet, short of 
there being any hope of raising their standard of living, there might be 
no chance of saving it from being further depressed to a nadir which 
would be disastrous for them and for the World as a whole, if the other 
points in the peasants’ dimly conceived programme were to be treated as 
sacrosanct. Could this rustic Gordian knot be untied? Or could it only 
be got rid of by being cut? And, if it should prove impossible to avoid a 
summary operation, what scabbard was to furnish the latter-day counter¬ 
part of Alexander’s sword ? 

Could the problem of this vast non-Western peasantry be solved by 
a culturally alien Modern Western regime such as the late British Raj in 
India ? Probably not, since an alien regime can seldom venture to interfere 
with the deep-seated prejudices of its subjects,' however well placed it 
may be for carrying out useful reforms on the surface of life. Then could 
the task be achieved under the regime of a native intelligentsia of the 
kind that, in India, had become the British Raj’s heir? Such rulers 
might perhaps be expected, a priori, to have better prospects of success 
in commending a policy framed by their Westernized minds to a 
peasantry from whom their hearts were not altogether alienated. Yet in 
a . d . 1948-9 Pandit Nehru and his colleagues must have felt some mis¬ 
givings as they looked on from India at the death agonies in China of a 
Kuomintang regime which was so similar to their own in composition, 
character, and outlook, and which had come to power in China little 
more than twenty years before the Congress regime’s own advent to 
power in India. In those few years the Kuomintang had rapidly de¬ 
generated from being the generous apostles of the Ideas of the French 
Revolution into becoming the corrupt conservators of traditional 
Chinese vested interests; retribution for this breach of trust had been no 
less quick to overtake them; and this nemesis had taken the form of a 
mass-secession of the Chinese peasantry from the Kuomintang to the 
Communist camp. Was Communism now to take its turn in trying to 
solve in China a problem with which an abortive Chinese experiment in 
Modern Western Democracy had failed to come to grips? And, if this 
was to be the next chapter of Chinese history, was that a portent of what 
was likely to happen next in other non-Western societies in which an 
antique peasantry was likewise being shaken out of a long-established 
psychological and economic inertia by the impact of Modern Western 
Democracy and Technology? 

In bidding for a mandate to take the world-wide problem of the 
peasantry in hand, Communism had at any rate one strong card to play 
mid-way through the twentieth century. At this date its advocates could 
argue that, of all the societies that were saddled with the problem, 
Russia was the only one so far in which an effort to grapple with it had 
been made on a scale and with a vigour that were worthy of the greatness 
and the gravity of the challenge; and they could go on to point out that 

1 The British Raj in India had nevertheless ventured to use its power to put down 
infanticide, sati, and the self-immolation of the devotees who had formerly offered 
themselves year by year to be crushed to death by Juggernaut’s car. 



686 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
this notable effort in Russia had not been made until after the establish¬ 
ment there of the existing Communist regime. 

This was, indeed, one of the points in which Lenin and his com¬ 
panions could justly claim to have done in Russia a deed of pressing 
urgency and momentous importance that had been perpetually left un¬ 
done by their Western-minded predecessors; for neither Tsar Peter 
the Great nor Tsar Alexander II had attempted to solve the problem 
of the peasantry in the terms in which their Communist successors 
envisaged it. 

Peter, indeed, had not tried to solve it at all, but had actually aggravated 
it by piling a top-heavy superstructure of Modern Western military 
organization and civil administration upon the frail foundation of a 
traditional rural economy which he had neglected to reinforce without 
calculating whether it would be capable of bearing the additional load 
that he was remorselessly laying upon it. Peter made no serious attempt 
to increase the agricultural production which was virtually the sole 
economic resource of the Russia of his day, and, so far from relaxing the 
legal obligations of the serfs to their owners, he tightened them up in 
pursuance of a short-sighted policy of using the institution of serfdom 
as an agency for the indirect collection of public revenue from the 
peasant producers of Russia’s national income through the direct taxa¬ 
tion of the personal incomes of the serf-owners. 1 

1 Peter had little cognizance of the sufferings inflicted on the population of his empire 
by the social heritage of Russian Orthodox Christendom and by his own innovations 
(BrQckner, A.: Peter drr Grout (Berlin 1S79. Grote), p. 513); he was concerned to place 
taxation on a statistical basis (ibid., p. 513), and he looked at the peasantry primarily 

from a fiscal. ' .. 

the peasants ■_ 
with a view to increasing 

laws were made more stringent < . _ 

to which they were attached, which had occurred for the first time in a.d. 1675, became 
frequent in reter’s reign (p. 523); industrialists were permitted to buy peasants as a 
means of providing themselves with man-power (p. 523); freeholders disappeared (p. 

3 . The truth was that Peter did not care for agriculture, and the result was that he 
e the condition of the Russian peasantry still worse than it had been before his time 
(p. 5 «). 

This deterioration in the peasantry’s condition went on in Russia under the Petrine 
regime until A.D. 1861 (Mettig, C.: Die Europdisierung Russlands im iS. Jahrhunderte 
(Gotha 1913. Perthes), p. 439), on the principle, established by Peter himself, that the 
state should lend its power to force the serf to work for his master in consideration of the 
work performed by the serf-owner for the state (ibid., p. 441). In a.d. 1747 the nobility 
were given the right to sell their serfs, and in a.d. 1760 the right to send them to penal 
servitude in European Russia or to exile in Siberia (p. 418). Passages recommending the 
emancipation of the serfs, which had been included in the first draft of the Empress 
Catherine II’s celebrated instructions for the abortive legislative commission that met in 
Moscow in a.d. 1767-8, were omitted from the final draft at the instance of the Empress's 
advisers (p. 246). In a.d. 17S0-3 the Great Russian institution of serfdom was introduced 
into the Ukraine (pp. 255 and 443). 

In Northern Russia, which had been opened up in relatively recent times and where 
the individual initiative of the pioneer settlers was still reflected in the frequency of 
peasant proprietorship, the Imperial Government was forcing communal ownership of 
the land upon the local peasantry in the fourth decade of the nineteenth century (Mettig, 
op. cit., p. 447). The village communities {min) were apt to treat rich peasants as the 
municipal euriales had been treated in the western provinces of the Roman Empire in 
the fourth and fifth centuries (ibid., p. 448), and the Imperial Government, for its part, 
was hostile (p. 448) to the growth of a class of well-to-do peasants (the class pilloried 
as kulaks by the subsequent Communist regime). Even under the emancipation scheme 
of a.d. i86r, the ownership of the land, in so far as it passed out of the hands of the 
former serf-owners, was acquired communally by the mir and not individually by 
the peasants composing the village community, and the Imperial Government forced 


a fiscal standpoint (p. 524). Hence he not only rejected the idea of emancipating 
icasants (p. 524), but actually increased the powers of the landlords over their serfs 
the landlords' tax-paying capacity (p. 523). The fugitive serf 
ngent (p. 296); the practice of selling serfs apart from the land 



THE OECUMENICAL PEASANTRY AND RUSSIA 687 

As for Tsar Alexander II, his success in securing the abolition of 
serfdom with the former serf-owners’ acquiescence was, from a Modern 
Western standpoint, certainly the greatest achievement of Russian 
statesmanship under the Petrine regime, and perhaps the greatest under 
any regime that had ever ruled in Russia down to the time of writing. In 
this act an autocratic empire which was a recent convert to the Modern 
Western way of life showed itself a more sincere and more effective 
devotee of Modern Western liberal ideals than the ostensibly demo¬ 
cratic Southern States of a republican American Union whose slave¬ 
owning citizens were children of the Western Civilization by birth and 
not by adoption. The same decade of the nineteenth century which saw 
a voluntary emancipation of the serfs in Russia saw these American 
slave-owners bring disaster and disgrace upon themselves by driving 
their Northern fellow countrymen to abolish slavery in the South by 
force majeure, at the cost of a civil war, as a penalty for the Southerners’ 
own persistent failure to rid themselves of their ‘peculiar institution’ on 
their own initiative. Yet, in relieving Russia, by bloodless revolution, 1 of 
her institutional agrarian malady, Tsar Alexander II did nothing to cure 
her technological agrarian malady; for the legal change in the peasants’ 
personal status was not accompanied by any appreciable change in 
methods of cultivation. About half the total arable land of Russia con¬ 
tinued to be cultivated by the peasants individually for their own 
benefit, 2 and about half by their former masters on a larger scale of agri- 

thc nor to serve, in place of the former serf-owner, a9 its instrument for collecting 
public revenue from the peasants and keeping them under governmental control. 

Though in the latter days of serfdom in Russia there were enlightened serf-owners 
who, in their treatment ot their serfs, distinguished themselves by their philanthropy 
(Mettig, op. cit., p. 449), the landowners as a class were out of touch with the peasantry, 
as Peter the Great had been, and this was true of the circles from which the 'Decem¬ 
brists’ of a.d. 182s were drawn (Le Monde Slave, Nouvelle S6ric, a”* Annie, No. ta, 
December 1925 (Paris 192s, Alcan): ‘Ccntenaire des Dicabristes’, p. 366). The 'Decem¬ 
brists’ were military officers recruited from the landowning nobility. The private 
soldiers, who were recruited from the nobility’s peasant serfs, were apt, for their part, 
before they had worked out their sentence of twenty-five years' military service, to lose 
a contact with the peasantry that their officers had never possessed (ibid., pp. 366-7). 

1 Though, unlike the abolition of slavery in the Southern States of the American 
Union, the abolition of serfdom in Russia was achieved without the owners having to 
be coerced by defeat in a civil war, the Russian reforms in the eighteen-sixties were 
undoubtedly accelerated and facilitated bv the antecedent defeat of Russia in a war 
against foreign adversaries. The Crimean war (gerebatur a.d. 1853—56) was a military 
reverse abroad which opened the way for a triumph of Liberalism at home by bringing 
to a discreditable end the oppressive reign of Tsar Nicholas I ( imperabat a.d. 1825- 
55). Such harvesting of liberal reforms at home from military reverses abroad was, 
indeed, characteristic of Russian history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The 
abortive liberal revolution of A.D. 1905 was the fruit of defeat in the Russo-Japanese War 
of a.d. 1002-4, and the abortive liberal revolution of a.d. 1917 the fruit of defeat in the 
General War of a.d. 1914-18. Conversely, military successes abroad were apt. in this 
chapter of Russian history, to play into the hands of political reactionaries on the home 
front. The tyrant Nicholas I was the principal beneficiary from the Russian people’s 
victory over a French invader of Russia in A.D. 1812, and this tyrant’s hold on Russia 
was confirmed by the victories of his armies over the Turks in a.d. 1829 and over the 
Poles in a.d. 1831. The working of the same ironical law of Russian history revealed 
itself again when the Russian people’s victory over a German invader of Russia in a.d. 
1940-5 served to chimp upon their shoulders, more tightly than ever, the yoke of a 
Soviet Communist regime. 

1 The peasants were still more eager to preserve and enlarge the allotments of land 
which they cultivated individually for their own benefit than they were to obtain their 
personal freedom from the bondage of serfdom. Their attitude was indicated in a reply 
which an inquiring nineteenth-century serf-owner, I. Zakushkin, drew from his own 



688 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
cultural operations; and the fact that the peasants now cultivated their 
land as free men, and the larger landowners theirs with hired instead of 
servile labour, did not have any magic effect upon a stagnant agricultural 
technique. 1 

No doubt, in contemporary France and Belgium and Denmark, 
peasant proprietorship might be wedded with specialization in agri¬ 
cultural production and technique to yield increased economic returns 
thanks to the auspiciously combined effects of the richness of the soil, 
the proximity of favourable markets, and the peasant’s personal industry, 
intelligence, and zeal in working as his own master; but these achieve¬ 
ments of peasant proprietorship here and there in Modern Western 
Europe were irrelevant to the situation in contemporary Russia. In the 
vast inefficiently cultivated expanses of Russia, agricultural productivity 
could be increased only by mechanical cultivation on the grand scale, 
and this was the radical reform which the Soviet Communist regime had 
dared to impose by force on a Russian peasantry which would never 
have adopted it of its own volition. 

After the Bolsheviks had incited the peasantry to bring them into 
power on a mandate to distribute the lands that Alexander II had left in 
the possession of the ci-devant serf-owning landlords, a duly established 
Communist regime used the power which they owed to the peasants’ 
support in order to reverse the policy by which this support had been 
purchased. They took out of the peasants’ hands by force not only the 
lands which Lenin had distributed among them individually but also 
those which had been left in their hands by Alexander, and they rode 
rough-shod over the peasants’ habits, prejudices, and aspirations by 
compelling them to cultivate virtually all the land thenceforward in 
large-scale mechanized collective farms. It could hardly be denied that 
the Russian peasantry had been first deceived and then coerced by their 
demonic latter-day rulers, but it would have been more difficult to refute 
the Soviet Government’s contention that the Russian peasantry and, 
with them, Russia herself had been dragooned into economic salvation by 
this high-handed and unscrupulous act of state. If it is possible for 
human beings to be saved in spite of themselves, and, if physical survival 
is not too dearly bought at the price of forfeiting both liberty and happi¬ 
ness, the Soviet Government might claim to have been the Russian 
peasantry’s saviour from economic disaster; and, since the establishment 
of their ascendancy over the peasant countries of Eastern Europe after 
the general war of a.d. 1939-45, they had seen to it that the same 
medicine should be administered to the agrarian economy of these 
satellite states by the puppet governments that had been hoisted into 
office there on the points of Russian bayonets. 2 

serf*: *W« belong to you, but the land belongs to us’ (Lt Monde Slave, Nouvelle Siric, 
2“ Annie, No. 12, December 1925 (Paris 1925, Alcan): ‘Centenaire dcs Dicabristes’, 
p. 368). 

1 There had been little change in agricultural technique in Russia since the intro¬ 
duction of a money economy in the sixteenth century (Mettig, C.: Die Europdiriaung 
Ruutondi im 18 Jahrhundertc (Gotha 1913. Perthes), p. 390). The raikolniki (i.e. the 
archaizing dissidents from a Romaicizing Russian Orthodox Church) had refused to 
cultivate potatoes from a feeling that any new food-plant must be Satanic (ibid., p. 396). 

2 The agrarian social policy of the Communist Party in the Soviet Union and its 


THE OECUMENICAL PEASANTRY AND RUSSIA 689 
In a.d. 1952 it was impossible to foretell whether the same destiny 
was in store for the Chinese and Indian peasantries in their turn. At this 
stage all that could be seen was that the problem of the starveling 
peasantry had now been placed on the agenda for the governments of all 
countries where such a peasantry was still to be found, and that in the 
handling of this problem the Communists now held the initiative. This 
was as much as to say that this problem had now become crucial for the 
Modern Western World. At the time, no doubt, the Western Society’s 
first concern was to put its own house in order; but a successful achieve¬ 
ment of this urgent and difficult task at home would not suffice to 
ensure the West’s salvation; for even an internally united Western 
World would find itself in a precarious position in the World as a whole 
if the great peasant majority of Mankind were to be gathered into the 
Communist fold; and this might be the peasantry’s cultural destiny if 
the Modern Western way of life failed to offer any practical prescription 
for the peasantry’s economic malady; for in that event the Communists’ 
prescription, however unpalatable in itself, would hold the field faute de 
mieux. 


satellites was all of a piece with their social policy for the urban industrial workers. 
In town and country-side alike, they were deliberately creating a proletariat of the kind 
which, in ninctccnth-century England, had been heedlessly brought into existence as a 
social by-product of the private economic enterprise of farmers and industrialists. The 
children of these English employers of rural and urban labour had taken stock of the 
social result of their fathers’ economic handiwork, and had seen that it was very bad, long: 
before the Communist critics of Western Capitalism had come into power in Russia and 
had used this power to create the very social conditions which were being denounced 
by them elsewhere. If a proletariat may be defined as a class whose members have no 
personal stake in the society in which they find themselves, and no say in the ordering 
of their own lives, the twentieth-century workers in the factories and collective farms of 
the Soviet Union would pass this test as well as. the factory workers and agricultural 
labourers of a ninctecnth-ccntury Great Britain. No doubt a spokesman of Communism 
would lose no time in reminding a bourgeois observer of one obvious difference in the 
situation of the proletariat in a communist and in a capitalist country. Whereas in a 
capitalist country the proletariat’s masters were private employers, in n communist 
country the proletariat’s sole master was the state. The difference was certainly an im¬ 
portant one; but, if the proletariats of the Soviet Union and the Western World could 
have compared notes in A.D. 1952 on the relative rigours of their respective lots, the 
proletarian employees of an omnipotent totalitarian state would probably have been 
judged to be more helplessly at the mercy of their masters than those of even the most 
powerful and oppressive private employers under a regime of free individual economic 
enterprise. 





IX. B (ii) (a) 3, ANNEX II 

SOME HISTORICAL CLUES TO THE RIDDLE 
OF PAKISTAN’S FUTURE 

During the century and three-quarters that had elapsed between 
Russia’s acquisition of a sea-board on the Black Sea in A.n. 1774 and the 
transfer of the responsibility for India’s security against foreign aggres¬ 
sion from British to Indian hands in a . d . 1947, the imaginations of 
British strategists and statesmen had been haunted by the bogey of a 
Russian descent upon India from the Central Asian side of the Hindu 
Kush. Was this British anxiety to be inherited by the Indian heirs of a 
British Raj ? In Indian minds in a.d. 1948-49 that question could 
hardly fail to be raised by the spectacle of a sweeping triumph of Com¬ 
munism in China. Perhaps an Indian student of history might seek com¬ 
fort in recalling that, when, in the thirteenth century of the Christian 
Era, all the rest of Asia, up to the Euphrates and the Halys and the Car¬ 
pathians, had been overrun by the Mongols, the Indian sub-continent 
alone had remained unmolested by world-conquerors who were lower¬ 
ing upon India simultaneously from a subjugated Burma and from a 
subjugated Afghanistan. Yet, if our Indian knew his history well and 
could bring himself to read its lessons without flinching, he might be 
driven to conclude that India’s escape from the Mongols, like her en¬ 
counter with the English, was an exception to an historical rule that 
India’s foreign conquerors were usually to be looked for across the 
Hindu Kush; and, if he was also a student of political geography, the 
new political map that had emerged from the partition of an oecumenical 
British Indian Empire into three successor-states would call up in his 
visual memory some disquieting reminiscences. 

The main body of Pakistan—extending, as it did, from the south¬ 
eastern foothills of the Hindu Kush to the coast of the Indian Ocean at 
the delta of the Indus—would remind him of the Transparopanisian 
limb of the mountain-bestriding empire of the Bactrian Greeks and 
their Kushan, Ghaznawl, Ghuri, and Durrani' successors; and, if he 
went on to search the contemporary map for counterparts of the other 
members of this geographically paradoxical yet historically familiar 
composite body politic, 1 2 these would leap to his eye in the contemporary 
shapes of Afghanistan and the Central Asian Republics of the Soviet 
Union. In the second century B.c. and in the first, the eleventh, the 
twelfth, and the eighteenth century of the Christian Era, Central Asian 
empire-builders with a land-locked base of operations within the borders 
of the territories latterly known as Afghan and Soviet Uzbekistan had 
forced the passage of the Hindu Kush and cleft their way through 
Indian territory down the valley of the Indus till they had carried their 

1 Previously known as Abdflli. 

2 This remarkable recurrent political phenomenon of an empire bestriding the Hindu 
Kush has been investigated by Sir W. Kerr Frascr-Tytler in Afghanistan (Oxford 1950, 
University Press), passim, but especially Part III, chap. :. 



CLUES TO PAKISTAN’S FUTURE 691 
advancing south-eastern frontier to the shores of an open sea; and in the 
twentieth century it required no great stretch of the political imagina¬ 
tion to envisage a fresh repetition of this recurrent episode of history. 
Had not the creation of Pakistan prefabricated for a future empire- 
builder from Central Asia the complementary Indian dominion which a 
Demetrius and a Kadphiscs 1 and a Mahmud Ghaznawl and a Muham¬ 
mad Ghuri and an Ahmad Durrani had been required to carve out for 
themselves? And, if land-locked Central Asian Powers whose metro¬ 
politan territories were confined within the modest limits of the Oxus- 
Jaxartes Basin had been impelled by claustrophobia to make a strenuous 
march to the sea across the breadth of a sub-continent, might not the 
same stimulus be expected to launch on the same course an empire em¬ 
bracing not merely a land-locked Central Asia 2 but the entire land¬ 
locked ‘heartland’ of the Old World? 

Since the days of Tsar Ivan the Terrible (imperabat a.d. 1533-84), 
Russia had been seeking an outlet to an ice-free open sea. She had 
battered her way to the east coast of the Baltic, only to find this outlet 
masked by Denmark’s command of the Sound; she had battered her 
way to the north coast of the Black Sea, only to find this outlet likewise 
masked by Turkey’s command of the Bosphorus. The exit from Russia’s 
remote north-western ice-free port of Murmansk was commanded by 
the adjoining coast of Norway; Archangel was ice-bound for half the 
year; Vladivostok could barely be kept open in the winter by the con¬ 
stant labour of icc-brcakers whose crew's saw the water freeze again be¬ 
hind them in their wake. 1 These results were little to show for nearly 
four hundred years of Russian endeavours to reach the open sea in all 
directions but one. For Russia in the twentieth century, an outlet on the 
Indian Ocean was the sole still untried possibility. Was not Karachi a 
tempting bait to dangle before eager Russian eyes? And could the 
transfer of Karachi from British to Pakistani hands have failed to 
suggest ‘dangerous thoughts’ to calculating Russian minds? 4 

1 Kadphiscs II Kushan regnabat circa A.D. 50-68 (see V. v. 275, n. 3.). 

1 The Central Asian Republics of the Soviet Union were represented at the Asian 
Congress, convened on Pandit Nehru’s initiative, which met at Delhi on the 23rd 
M»rch-2nd April, 1947. 

1 The writer saw this happen with his own eyes from on board a Japanese packet- 
boat which made its way into the harbour of Vladivostok, piloted by an ice-breaker, on 
the 13th January, 1930. 

* A corridor to Karachi was not the only attractive possibility that the creation of 
Pakistan had opened up for expansive-minded Russian ^eopoliticians; for the shape 
of this Muslim successor-state of the British Indian Empire was one of the curiosities 
of political geography. While its main body in the Indus Valley offered an open road 
to Karachi from the North-West Frontier of India, its enclave in Eastern Bengal, which 
was separated from the main body of Pakistan by the whole breadth of the Indian Union, 
offered an equally inviting ingress into India across a North-East Frontier which had 
been opened up, in the course of the general war of a.d. 1939-45, by the building of the 
Burma Road. At the moment when, in China, Communism seemed to be carrying all 
before it, a Russian historian would have the pleasure of recollecting that in the thir¬ 
teenth century of the Christian Era the Mongol cavalry had succeeded in making their 
way from Transbaikalia to Burma, across the whole breadth of China, without any 
Burma Road to speed them on their path. 



IX. B (ii) (a) 4, ANNEX I 

THE INEFFECTIVENESS OF PANISLAMISM 

The remarkable success of the core of the Islamic World in preserving 
or regaining its freedom from alien political control during the 270 
years that had elapsed between a.d. 1683 and a.d. 1952 1 was, no doubt, 
one explanation of the equally remarkable miss-fire of a nineteenth-' 
century Panislamic Movement that was the response which the Muslims 
might have been expected to make to the challenge of an increasing 
Western and Russian pressure upon them. The nineteenth-century 
Muslims to whom the Panislamic programme of strength through soli¬ 
darity made an appeal were those outlying Muslim communities that 
did lose their independence in this age. 

Both the local Ottoman dominant minority and the Arab and Berber 
subject majority of the population in Algeria, Tunisia, and Tripolitania, 
for example, reversed their attitude towards the Ottoman Empire after 
the initiation in a.d. 1830 of the French conquest of the Maghrib. . 
During the preceding two centuries or so, the ruling element in the 
Ottoman Barbary States had been bent on asserting its de facto inde¬ 
pendence of the Porte; from a.d. 1830 onwards both the anti-French 
resistance movement in Algeria and the local Ottoman regime in the now 
likewise threatened adjoining Ottoman principality of Tunisia began to 
look to the Porte for support against French aggression. In a.d. 1864 
the reigning Bey of Tunis sought to strengthen his tics with the Porte by 
sending on a mission to Constantinople the Circassian slave-statesman 
Khayr-ad-Din, who published in a.d. 1867 a book advocating the adop¬ 
tion of Westernizing reforms by Muslim countries as a means towards 
their becoming more competent to hold their own against Western im¬ 
perialism. 1 A further move in the same direction was made by the 
Tunisian Government in a.d. 1871. 3 

From the opposite extremity of the Islamic World, similar embassies 
from Central Asian Turkish Muslim rulers, soliciting the help of the 
Porte against Russian imperialism, began to arrive at Constantinople in 
the seventh decade of the nineteenth century, after the Russians had 
begun to direct their military energies from the by then all but com¬ 
pleted conquest of the Caucasus to the conquest of Central Asia. 4 In 
a.d. 1863 a Western traveller in Central Asia found that Central Asian 
khans were taking pride and comfort in being invested with honorary 

* Sec pp. 210-32, above. 

1 Khayr-ad-Din Paths: Muqaddamdt Kitdb Aqraam al-MaiSlik fi Ma'rifat Ahudl al- 
Mamdtik, first published in Arabic in a.d. 1867 and in a French translation, under the 
title Rifoimet Neeeuairet aux Etats Mutubiums, in a.d. 1868. The writer of this Study 
possesses a copy of the second French edition (Paris 1875, Dcntu) and of an Arabic 
edition published at Constantinople in a.h. 1293 (a.d. 1876) at the Jevfi’ib (’News’) 
Press. 

1 See Davison, Roderic H.: Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856-1876 (thesis sub¬ 
mitted to Harvard University for the Degree of Ph.D., 1st April, 1942), pp. 263-5 *nd 
349. (The author had kindly permitted the writer of this Study to read and cite a type¬ 
script copy of this still unpublished work which was deposited in the Library of Harvard 
University.] ‘ Sec Davison, op. cit., pp. 343-7. 



THE INEFFECTIVENESS OF PANISLAMISM 693 
offices in the Ottoman Padishah’s household; 1 and from a.d. 1869 on¬ 
wards there were contacts between the Porte and Ya'qub Beg, the 
Turk! Muslim rebel against Manchu rule in the Tarim Basin. From 
a.d. 1873 onwards Ya'qub caused the Padishah’s name to be inscribed 
on his coinage and invoked in the Khutbah within his dominions, and an 
Ottoman mission made its way from Constantinople to his headquarters. 
Envoys from Afghanistan and from the Panthai Muslim rebels against 
Manchu rule in Yunnan also presented themselves, on similar errands, 
at the court of Sultan 'Abd-al-'Aziz (imperabat a.d. 1861-76), and in 
a.d. 1873 he received an appeal from the Achincse Muslims in Sumatra 
for help against the aggression of the Dutch. 

A sentimental attachment to an idealised conception of the Ottoman 
Empire began to appear about the same time among the Muslim diasporh 
—Shi'I as well as Sunni—in India, as a psychological compensation for 
the loss of their own former imperial dominion over a Hindu majority 
of the population of the sub-continent and for the painfully overwhelm¬ 
ing service which the subsequent British conquerors of India had done 
for these local Muslim predecessors of theirs in saving them from the 
vengeance of the resurgent Hindus by imposing an impartial British Raj 
on both these Indian communities. 

The Ottoman Empire was, indeed, the only political rallying point on 
which the Muslim victims of Western and Russian imperialism could 
fall back—not so much in virtue of her dubious and long-neglected title 
to the inheritance of the Caliphate as because, even in her nineteenth- 
century infirmity, she was by far and away the most powerful, efficient, 
and enlightened Muslim state in existence. At the same time, her patent 
weakness in this age by comparison with the encircling non-Muslim 
Powers made it an embarrassment rather than an opportunity for her to 
find herself the cynosure of nineteenth-century Muslim eyes. Out of 
fear of France, she forbore from making any serious response to Tuni¬ 
sian overtures to her between the date of the French descent on Algeria 
in a.d. 1830 and the date of the long-dreaded establishment of a French 
protectorate over Tunisia in a.d. 1881, and she was quite impotent to 
help the Caucasian and Central Asian Muslims in their desperate 
struggle to resist the imposition on them of a Russian yoke. All that the 
Porte could do was to take a modest advantage of the revulsion of 
Maghrib! feeling in her favour by establishing her direct rule over 
Tripolitania and Cyrenaica in a.d. 1835 anc * t0 sa * ve ^ er conscience for 
her inability to assist the Maghrib! and Caucasian resistance movements 
in the field by giving new homes in still intact Ottoman territory to 
Algerian and Circassian ‘displaced persons’ after their struggles to main¬ 
tain their independence had ended in an inevitable ultimate defeat. 

Thus Panislamism fell between two stools. On the one hand neither 
the Ottoman Empire nor, a fortiori, any other still independent Muslim 
state was capable in the nineteenth century of the Christian Era of con¬ 
stituting itself into an effective agency for vindicating the integrity and 
independence of the Islamic World as a whole, while on the other hand 

* Sec Vamb&y, A.: Travels in Central Aria, 1S63 (London 1864, Murray), pp. 
434 - 5 - 



694 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
the fact that all but a few fragments of the core of the Islamic World had 
succeeded in remaining independent on a low level of vitality took the 
edge off the appeal of the Panislamic gospel of self-preservation through 
an increase of inter-Islamic solidarity. If, in the course of the nineteenth 
century, the whole of the Islamic World, instead of a few fragments and 
fringes, had been engulfed in the British, French, and Russian empires, 
the nineteenth-century apostle of Panislamism, the Sayyid Jamal-ad- 
Din 1 al-Afghani (vitebat circa a.d. 1S38-A.D. 1897), 2 might have found 
a more favourable mission-field for his propaganda. 

Jamal-ad-Din’s message to his fellow Muslims was twofold. They 
were to defend themselves against the West in the first place by trans¬ 
cending their own traditional sectarian and political divisions and rally¬ 
ing round the Ottoman Padishah as Caliph, and in the second place by 
adopting Western ideas, institutions, and techniques that were the secret 
of the Modem’s West’s strength; 3 and it is significant that the Sayyid 
was far more successful in his advocacy of the second of these two pre¬ 
scriptions. In his preaching of Islamic solidarity he was, it is true, un¬ 
precedentedly successful in gaining a following among Sunnis and Shi'is 
alike. In a Sunni Egypt he was the inspiration of Shaykh Muhammad 
'Abduh, and in a Shi'I Persia he moved the mujtahids in a.d. 1891-2 to 
crush Nasir-ad-Din Shah’s attempt to grant a tobacco monopoly to a 
group of British entrepreneurs. Yet the chief practical effect of his 
missionary work was to promote the birth of a parochial nationalist 
movement in Egypt and a parochial nationalist movement in Persia, and 
thereby to create new, and perhaps insurmountable, obstacles to the 
political unification of the Islamic World under the aegis of a universal 
state crystallizing round the nineteenth-century torso of the Ottoman 
Empire. In so far as Jamal-ad-Din’s Ottoman admirer and patron Sultan 
‘Abd-al-Hamid II {imperabat a.d. 1876-1909) tried to translate the 
Sayyid’s ideas into practice, he largely stultified the Sayyid’s intentions 
by seeking in Panislamism a political prop for the declining strength of 
Turkey rather than attempting to use Turkey’s residual strength as a 
pillar for the support of Panislamism. 4 

The inference from this aftermath of Jamal-ad-Din’s career seems to 

* Accounts of the Sayyid Jamil-ad-DIn’s career and ideas will be found in Browne, 
E. G.: The Persian Revolution of 1905-1909 (Cambridge 1910, University Press), pp. 
1-30, and in an article by Goldziher, I.: s.v. 'Djamil al-Din al-Afghani’, in the En¬ 
cyclopaedia of Islam, vol. 1 (Leyden 1913, Brill), ftp. 1008-11. 

* According to Browne, op. cit.,p. 4, the As'adfibSd which was Jamal-ad-Din’s birth- 

C lace was probably not the place of that name near Kabul, which was claimed as his 
irthplace by the Sayyid himself, but the As'adabSd near Hamadan, as asserted by 
Nizim-al-lslam of KIrman in his Ta'rihh-i-BidJri-i-Irdnfyan. If so, the Sayyid was bom 
a Shi'i and n subject of the Shah of Persia. 

> The Panislamic strategy of resistance to Western aggression against the Islamic 
World could, of course, be combined equally well with either Herodian or Zealot tactics. 
As an example of a Zealot-minded exponent of Panislamism we may cite the North 
Caucasian Panislamic leader the Amir Shaykh Uzun Hajji Khayr Khan, who was active 
in A.D. 1919. 'Uzun Hajji was distinguished by simplicity and directness, as much as 
by his fanaticism. “I am twisting a rope in order to hang all engineers, students and, in 
general, people who write from left to right." These words of Uzun Hajii’s...’ (Arshu- 
rani, A., and Habidullin (IHabibullin], Kh: Ocherki Panislamizma i Panlyurkizma v 
Rossii (Studies in Panislamism and Panturkism in Russia] (Moscow 1931, Bczbozhnik 
(Ami-religiousl Press), p. 67, communicated to the writer by B. H. Sumner). 

* 'Abd-al-Hamid’s exploitation of the Ottoman Caliphate has been touched upon in 
VI. vii. 22-24. 



THE INEFFECTIVENESS OF PANISLAMISM 695 
be that the nineteenth-century Western and Russian pressure on the 
heart of the Islamic World was not sufficiently severe to make the still 
unsubjugated Muslim peoples feel that Western nationalism was a 
luxury in which they could not afford to indulge. In any case it is an 
historical fact that the still independent Islamic peoples Westernized 
piecemeal, like the Ottoman Orthodox Christian peoples, instead of 
Westernizing eti bloc, like Russian Orthodox Christendom, within the 
political framework of a universal state. 



IX. B (ii) (a) 4 , ANNEX II 

THE EXPLOITATION OF EGYPT BY 
MEHMED ‘ALl 

Egypt was not just a passive piece of Mankind’s physical environment; 
it was a creation of human audacity, industry, and genius out of the 
unpromising raw material of a forbidding jungle-swamp; 1 and, unlike 
its sister creature the Land of Shinar, the system of embanked and 
irrigated fields in the Lower Nile Valley had never ceased, even in the 
periods of its worst neglect, to be the going concern that had been made 
of it in the fourth millennium b.c. by the founders of the nomes, who had 
tamed the valley piecemeal, and by the subsequent founders of the 
United Kingdom, who had co-ordinated these works of local reclama¬ 
tion into a single technologically and administratively centralized 
concern. Through these abiding results of their handiwork, the genius 
of the fourth-millennium makers of Egypt set its stamp more than once 
in the course of subsequent history on the policy of later masters of 
Egypt who had sufficient genius of their own to enter into the founding 
fathers’ labours. 

The founders' original lay-out of their Nilotic estate imposed on their 
successors the necessity of subjecting the population to a centralized 
autocratic regime in order to harvest the potential productivity of a 
regimented soil and water—-whatever the proportions in which the joint 
product of management and labour might afterwards be distributed 
between the human parties to this vast economic enterprise 1 . This 
permanent idiosyncracy of Egypt herself must be the explanation of the 
astonishing similarity between the regimes respectively inaugurated by 
Mehmcd 'All in the first half of the nineteenth century of the Christian 
Era and by the Ptolemies at the turn of the fourth and third centuries 
B.C., since it is improbable that Mehmcd 'All was aware, even dimly, of 
the methods employed by these predecessors of his who were also his 
Macedonian fellow countrymen, while it is impossible that he should 
have been familiar with the details of the Ptolemaic administration that 
were brought to light after his death by the excavation and study of 
documentary papyri. Yet so masterful was Egypt herself in dictating to 
her rulers the methods by which they must exploit her that a survey of 
the acts of Mehmcd 'AH and his son Ibrahim might also serve, with a 
mere change of names, to describe the acts of Ptolemy Soter and 
Ptolemy Philadelphus. 

The Turkish Macedonian rulers of Egypt, like their Greek Macedon¬ 
ian forerunners, planted Egypt with fruit and forest trees; 3 extended 
the area of irrigation and cultivation; 4 dictated what crops should be 

* See II. i. 302-15. * On this question see III. iii. 214-15. 

> See Clot-Bey, A. B.: Aperfu GMral lur I'figyptc (Pa ris 1840, Fortin ct Masson, 

2 volt.), vol. i, p. 153. 

* See Jabarti, Snaykh 'Abd-ar-Rabmin a!-: 'Ajd’ib-al-Athur fi’t-Tarajim aa'l- 
Akhbdr (French translation: Cairo 1888-1896, Imprinicric Nationalc; Paris 1888-1896, 
Leroux), vol. ix, p. 194; Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 242 and 247; vol. ii, pp. 436-7; 



EXPLOITATION OF EGYPT BY MEHMED 'ALl 697 
sown in what quantities; 1 laid out model farms and botanical gardens; 2 
introduced new crops, of which cotton was the chief, 3 but which also 
included silk, indigo, sugar, hemp, and opium; 4 imported agricultural 
experts from abroad and sent Egyptian students of agriculture to Europe 
and the West Indies ; 5 and monopolized for the Government the purchase 
of the cotton, rice, gum, indigo, sugar, opium, and other crops. 6 

Under Mehmed 'All’s rdgime in Egypt the peasants had become the 
Government’s tenants—holding the arable land in usufruct only, and 
paying kharSj—in the course of the years a.d. 1808-14, when Mehmed 
'All had abolished tax-farming ( illisam ), eliminated the tax-farmers 
( multazims ), and expropriated the waqf endowments invested in arable 
land (as distinct from gardens and houses) against compensation in the 
form of annuities from the public treasury. 7 The new system of direct 
collection of the land-tax by the Government itself was based on a new 
survey of the land. 8 By the time when the Government had also taken it 
upon itself to direct the peasants’ agricultural operations, to supply 
them with the means of production, and to buy their non-cereal crops at 
fixed prices, the peasants had become mere hands on a state-managed 
plantation coextensive with the cultivated area of the country, 6 and the 

Kramers, J. H., s.v. ‘Khcdiw’, in the Encyclopaedia 0f Islam, vol. ii (Leyden 1917, 
Brill), p. 947. 

' See Jabarti. op. cit., vol. i*. p. 190; Bowring, Report on Egypt and Candia (London 
1840, Clowes), pp. 14 and 19. ‘He not only compelled the fellih to cultivate, but in some 
areas he determined what crops should be grown, and required the produce to be de¬ 
livered into the government warehouses at a fixed rate’ (Dodwcll, H.: The Founder of 
Modem Egypt (Cambridge 1931, University Press), p. 218). 

2 See Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. i, pp. 154-60, and vol. ii, p. 394; Bowring, op. cit., 
pp. 26-27. 

3 Cotton culture was started in Egypt in A.n. i82r and Sea Island cotton seed from 
South Carolina was introduced in a.d. 1828 (Kramers, op. cit., pp. 947-8). 

* See Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 260^9; Bowring, op. cit., pp. 21—22 and 23; 
Kramers, op. cit., p. 948. According to Bowring, loc. cit., Ibrahim Pasha started a sugar 
plantation and sugar mills, and sent a certain Omer Efendi to the West Indies to study 
rum-making. According to Kramers, op. cit., the cane-sugar culture in Upper Egypt 
was started only in A.D. 1867, in the reign of the Khedive Isma'il. 

» See Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 257; Bowring, op. cit., pp. 23 and 26. 

6 Sec Clot-Bey, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 186; Bowring, op. cit., p. 20. 

7 Sec Clot-Bcy ( op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 182-3; Kramers, op. cit., p. 946. Details are given 
in Dodwcll, op. cit., p. 32. In A.D. 1808 Mehmed 'All investigated the multazims' titles 
and records, and then annulled all irregular grants and expropriated (on pensions) all 
multazims who were in arrears with their payments to the Treasury. The surviving nal- 
tazims were expropriated in a.d. 1814 (see Jabarti, op. cit., vol. ix, p. 79). 

8 See Jabarti, op. cit., vol. ix, p. 90. 

» Mehmed 'AH ‘succeeded in centralising the entire production in his own hands [by 
his monopoly system] and of [lie] disposing of it freely; the peasants were no more than 

3 -labourers who were obliged to sell their products at fixed prices to the Government 
to pay likewise their taxes in kind’ (Kramers, op. cit., p. 947; cp. Clot-Bey, op. cit., 
vol. ii, pp. 182-3). The impact made by Mehmed 'Ali's monopoly system on the life 
of the Egyptian people reverberates through Jnbarti’s narrative. In a.d. 1812 Mehmed 
'All monopolized the marketing of the entire cereal crop of Upper Egypt and the entire 
rice crop (ibid., vol. viii, pp. 344 and 348); but the practice was not confined to the 
handling of agricultural p roduce.In the same year, the Pasha monopolized the marketing 
of imports, at the same time raising the prices (ibid,, vol. viii, p. 345), and established 
a hold over internal transport by building a river-fleet which he operated himself (ibid., 
vol. viii, p. 345). He also monopolized slaughter-houses (ibid., vol. viii, p. 351) and even 
forbade artisans to work for private employers (ibid., vol. viii, p. 357). According to 
Jabarti the new monopolies were devisea by Greeks and Armenians and were farmed 
out by the Pasha to them (ibid., vol. viii, p. 355). In a.d. 1814 Mehmed 'All monopolized 
the transport of Ottoman pilgrims to the Islamic Holy Places in the Hijaz, and exacted 
his price from them (ibid., vof. ix, p. 100).In A.D. 1816 he established a virtual monopoly 
over all shipping (ibid., vol. ix, p. 197). The objective of these monopolies was, of course, 



698 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
servile status to which they had been reduced was brought home to 
them by the conscription of their labour for public works. 1 

It will be seen that, unlike Peter the Great, Mehmed 'All did not 
neglect the agricultural basis of his Western superstructure; but the 
measures which he took in his fundamental economic policy have to be 
credited—or debited—to the dictates of Egypt as well as to the prompt¬ 
ings of Mehmed 'All’s own genius. Peter's economic insight was 
certainly not inferior to his; and we may indeed surmise that Mehmed 
‘All, had he been Tsar of Muscovy, would have neglected agriculture 
as Peter did, and that Peter, had he been Viceroy of Egypt, would have 
fostered agriculture by the drastic but dubious methods of Mehmed 'All. 

price-control with a view to price-raising. The state slaughter-houses sold their product 
to the butcher* at fixed wholesale prices, and the butchers' retail prices were likewise 
fixed by the state (op. cit., vol. ix, p. 226). According to Jabarti (vol. ix, pp. 224 et se^q.) 
the imposition by the state of maximum retail prices without regard to seasonal variations 
in the relation between supply and demand, and even without regard to the levels of 
the state-imposed wholesale prices, proved paralysing for trade. In a.d. 1817 Mehmed 
'AH established a monopoly of hides at fixed prices (ibid., vol. ix, p. 252) and a monopoly 
of the operation of all looms. The raw material* of the textile industry were bought up 
by the Government and were distributed by it to the weavers, and the product was then 
sold by the Government at about three times the previous price (pp. 252-3). In a.d. 
1820 Mehmed ‘All monopolized soap (ibid., vol. ix, p. 317). 

One of the objects of British polity in the negotiation of the Anglo-Ottoman commer¬ 
cial treaty of the 16th August, 1838, was to secure the abolition of monopolies in the 
Ottoman Empire with an eye to insisting on the application of this treaty provision to 
Ottoman territories under Mehmed * All's administration. An escape-clause in previous 
Ottoman capitulations which had left the Ottoman Government a loophole for establish¬ 
ing monopolies at will was duly eliminated by the terms of the new treaty (Dodwcll, 
op. cit., pp. 220-1; Bailey, P. E.: British Policy and the Turkish Reform Movement, 
1S26-1853 (Cambridge, Mass. 1942, Harvard University Press), p. 125); but subse¬ 
quent local negotiations between representatives of the British Government and 
Mehmed 'Ali ended in a compromise. It was agreed that Mehmed 'Ali should maintain 
his monopolies on condition of his selling the produce at public auction (Dodwcll, op. 
cit., p. 222). 

« Jabarti records that in A.D. 1817 peasant* were conscripted to dig a new Alexandria 
canal (op. cit., vol. ix, p. 240). In a.d. 1819 they were conscripted again for canal digging, 
and this just before the maize harvest, so that it was no wonder that they had to be 
secured with ropes round their necks (ibid., vol. ix, p. 299)- In 1818, 4,000 young men 
were conscripted to work in government factories (ibid., vol. ix, p. 274). 



IX. B (ii) (a) 5, ANNEX 

JEWISH HISTORY AND THE MILLET IDEA 

By James Parkes 

The conception of community evolved between the first and fourth 
centuries of the Christian Era by a Rabbinic Judaism fitted admirably 
into the millet idea; and, so long as the majority community was pre¬ 
pared to allow a Jewish community milletal autonomy, the essential 
minimum requirements of Rabbinic Judaism could be maintained in 
any country' in the World. In tolerating a variety of legal and social 
systems within a larger whole, Medieval Christendom as well as Islam 
made a Jewish Millet an acceptable social organisation for Judaism, and 
in the Western Society the Jewish Millet outlived by centuries all its 
peers, surviving until the nineteenth-century emancipation. 

It seems to me, however, necessary to recognize that the millet idea 
in East and West, while it made Jewish survival possible by its recogni¬ 
tion of communal autonomy, yet contained elements which made it 
intolerable as a permanent social organization. In particular the idea of 
inequality seems to me to be inherent in it. Neither Islam nor Medieval 
Christendom recognized Jews as equals; and both tolerated Jewish 
autonomy because both had the power to circumscribe it at will in their 
own interests. In both East and West there was also the social factor, in 
the sense that the inferiority of status implicit in the milletal dispensation 
encouraged a contempt which was always there, even if under the surface. 
A great deal of rubbish is talked about the excellent situation of Jews 
under Islam before Zionism. Existence for all but a few rich merchants 
was unenviable in the ghettoes and mal5s of the Islamic World for many 
centuries before Zionism as a political movement was born. 

Emancipation, by its emphasis on Judaism as an individual ethic, and 
on Jews as citizens manifesting a^personal difference only in the religious 
buildings which they attended (or did not attend) for worship one day 
a week, created just the situation described by you. 1 Gentile societies 
that could afford not to fear Jewish competition accepted Jews; Gentile 
societies that had a still unfulfilled ambition to breed a native Gentile 
‘bourgeoisie’ of their own hated the Jews and were jealous of them. But 
either situation dealt only with that aspect of Jewish life which expressed 
itself in economic structures and adaptabilities; and both ignored the 
fact that the heart of Judaism and of Jewish communal life was left un¬ 
satisfied by an economic liberty' supplemented by a right to go to syna¬ 
gogue on Saturday instead of going to church on Sunday. The core of 
Rabbinic Judaism, inherited from its interpretation of the Law and the 
Prophets of the Old Testament, was a belief in a community that would 
give scope for a social justice and a righteousness which were the divinely 
appointed objectives of Man’s life in This World. The ideal had been 
narrowed, ossified, and even perverted by the conditions of millet life: 
but within the Millet it had at least a chance of survival. 

* On pp. 285-8, above.—A.J.T. 


700 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

After the dissolution of the Millet, Jews individually plunged, where 
free, with enthusiasm into all movements for social reform and humani- 
tarianism in a nineteenth-century Western World; but in Eastern 
Europe, where most of the Jewish people lived, the local conditions 
ruled out the possibility of any such individual Jewish participation in 
a liberal Gentile life; and therefore here one of two things was bound to 
happen. Some East European Jews sought an outlet for their inner 
malaise in taking part in Gentile revolutionary movements, some in an 
attempt to find a new communal basis for Jewish life. When a recrudes¬ 
cence of Antisemitism in Western Europe inhibited, or prevented, 
individual Jews there from expressing themselves in Gentile national 
movements aiming at the achievement of greater social righteousness, 
Jews in Western Europe likewise began to be attracted to one of the 
two alternatives which had grown out of the Eastern European situation. 

In both East and West a return to a milletal dispensation was ruled 
out. With all its merits a millet system is only possible either in a society 
that is at a much more developed stage than any society had yet reached 
at the time of writing, or else in a society in which there is no effective 
devolution of responsibility and authority from the central government 
to the local geographical administration—the city, the county, or what 
not. The Islamic Society's weakness in this respect had enabled the 
millet system to survive in Dar-al-Islam down to recent times, and had 
allowed minorities a certain liberty and vitality, but this only at the cost 
of their having to live within a general framework of stagnation. It was 
inevitable that to many Jews the only alternative should seem to be 
the autonomy (or independence) of the national community (it is interest¬ 
ing that Austrian Jewish ‘revolutionaries’ for some time sought to cope 
with the nationality problem in Eastern Europe along the lines of 
‘personal nationality’, which was an attempt to adapt the millet idea to 
contemporary European conditions). 

Jews turned to Nationalism, not only because it was the contemporary 
vogue, but also because, with the failure of the idea of ‘personal national¬ 
ity’, it was the only framework within which the unsatisfied longing for 
a medium in which to work for greater social righteousness could be 
satisfied. In other words, there were deeper Jewish roots for Jewish 
nationalism than you have allowed for. 

It is also interesting to discover the way in which the emergence of 
a Jewish nationalism—which was, as you say, fantastic in terms of the 
non-existence of a territory where Jews cultivated the soil—followed 
a period of intense Jewish intellectual activity which had been devoted 
largely to the study of Jewish history, and not merely to the study of 
a Rabbinic Judaism which a Rabbinic orthodoxy had come to regard as 
the Jewish intellect’s sole legitimate field. The flowering of a Judischc 
Wissenschaft is an integral part of the picture of the emergence of a 
Modem Jewry; and this must also be regarded as being one of the 
outstanding events in the Jews’ encounter with the Western Society, 
since it was the product of Jewish access to Western academic and 
intellectual life. 



IX. B (ii) (a) 7, ANNEX 

THE WELTANSCHAUUNG OF ALEXANDER 

HERZEN 

Alexander Herzen ( vivebat a.d. 1812-70) was the natural son of a 
Russian nobleman by a German mother. While still a student at the 
University of Moscow, he fell foul of the autocratic regime of Tsar 
Nicholas I. He left Russia in a.d. 1847 and spent the rest of his life in 
Western Europe in a society of Russian and Western liberal exiles. In 
taking this personal course, Herzen was opting for Westernization, and 
he accounted himself an opponent of his ‘Slavophil’ Russian contem¬ 
poraries ; yet in the same breath he proclaimed his affinity with them : 

‘Yes, we were their opponents, but very strange ones. We had the same 
love, but not the same way of loving, and, like Janus or the two-headed 
eagle, we looked in opposite directions, though the heart that beat within 
us was but one.’ 1 

The love which these nineteenth-century Russian ‘Herodians’ and 
Russian ‘Zealots’ shared was, of course, their love for Russia; but an even 
stronger bond between them was a hatred which they likewise shared 
for a middle-class outlook and way of life that had become dominant 
in the contemporary Western World. Herzen revolted as violently as the 
Slavophils themselves against any suggestion that Russia might renounce 
her historic identity by abandoning herself to this Modern Western 
middle-class culture. This idea seemed outrageous to him because he 
believed no less fervently than the Slavophils in Russia’s destiny; and 
this belief that Russia had a destiny incompatible with conversion to 
the Modern Western middle-class way of life brought Herzen into line, 
not only with his Slavophil Russian contemporaries, but also with his 
Communist Russian successors. As an anti-bourgeois Russian aristocrat 
he became a Russian prophet of a socialism that was to be attained in 
Russia through revolution and was to lead to a sanguinary conflict be¬ 
tween Russia and a Western World from which Russia—Slavophil or 
Socialist—was divided by a permanent and unbridgeable moral gulf. 

These features in Herzen’s outlook are brought out in his memoirs 
with a wealth of illustration of which only a few characteristic specimens 
can be cited here. 

‘The Western European is not in a normal condition; he is moulting. 

. . . The historical process has left in the foreground the slimy stratum of 
the petty-bourgeois, under which the fossilised aristocratic classes arc 
buried and the rising masses submerged. 1 . . . The petty-bourgeois were 
not produced by the Revolution. ... Set free, they passed over the dead 
bodies of those who had freed them, and established their own regime. 3 

1 This passage from Herzen’s periodical The Bell, p. 90, is quoted in Herzen, A.: 
My Past and Thoughts, English translation by Garnett, C. (London 1924-7, Chatto and 
Windus, 6 vols.), vol. ii, pp. 254 and 302. The quotations from Mrs. Garnett’s transla¬ 
tion have been made with the permission of the publishers. 

1 HerzcD, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 22S-9. * Ibid., vol. iii, p. 134; cp. p. 147. 



702 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

... Parliamentary government... is simply the wheel in a squirrel’s cage, 
and the most colossal one in the World. 1 ... Under the influence of petty- 
bourgeoisie, everything is changed in Europe. Chivalrous honour is re¬ 
placed by the honesty of the book-keeper, elegant manners by propriety, 
courtesy by stiff decorum, pride by a readiness to take offence, parks by 
kitchen gardens, palaces by hotels open to all (that is, all who have 
money).* . . . Bourgeoisie is the final form of Western European Civilisa¬ 
tion, its coming of age. . . . This closes the long series of its visions. . . . 
By hard work the nations of the West have won their winter quarters. 
Let others show their mettle.’* 

How infinitely remote from all this is the Russian spirit! 

'Petty Bourgeoisdom is incompatible with the Russian character—and 
thank God for it. 4 . .. There is .. . something irrational in our lives, but 
there is nothing vulgar, nothing stagnant, nothing bourgeois. ... You are 
restrained by scruples, you are held back by second thoughts. We have 
neither second thoughts nor scruples; all we lack is strength . . . Wc 
have no law but our nature, our national character.’* 

Russia’s character is her destiny, and a nineteenth-century Herzen is 
as sure of this destiny as a sixteenth-century Philotheus. 6 

'Are we not perhaps satisfied with vestibules because our history is still 
knocking at the gate? 7 ... In our attitude to the Europeans . . . there are 
points of resemblance to the attitude of the Germans to the Romans. In 
spite of our exterior, we are still barbarians. 8 . . . Wc have nowhere those 
hard-and-fast prejudices which, like a paralysis, deprive the Western 
European of the use of half his limbs. 9 . . . (The Polish « 5 migr£s] had a rich 
past; we had a great hope. Their breast was covered with scars, while we 
were toughening our muscles to receive them. Beside them, we were like 
recruits beside veterans. The Poles are mystics; we arc realists. 10 ... Have 
we not. . . the right to look upon Russia as . . . the centre towards which 
the Slav World, in its striving toward unity, is gravitating?" ... Do you 
not think it would be as well to become more closely acquainted with this 
inconvenient neighbour who makes himself felt throughout the whole of 
Europe, in one place with bayonets, in another with spies ?’ ,J 

The next manifestation of Russia’s puissant non-Western destiny 
will be an anti-bourgeois revolution. 

'The free and rational development of Russian national existence is at 
one with the ideas of Western Socialism." . . . The Russian enjoys a 
terrible advantage over the European; he has no traditions, no habits, 
nothing akin to him to lose. The man who has no wealth of his own or 
of others goes most safely along dangerous paths." . . . The Russian 
imperial autocracy ... is a military and civil dictatorship with far more 
resemblance to the Cacsarism of Rome than to a feudal monarchy. A dic¬ 
tatorship . . . cannot be permanent.'* . . . Who will be the predestined 
saviour? . . . Whoever it may be, it is our task to meet him with warm 
welcome.’ 16 

» Heracn. op. cit., vol. iii, p. 144* * Ibid., vol. iii, p. 142. 

* Ibid., vol. vi, p. 6s. 4 Ibid., vol. ii, p. 229. i Ibid., vol. vi, p. 240. 

* See VI. vii. 25-36* 7 Herien, op. cit., vol. ii, p. 114. 

* Ibid., vol. vi, p. 46; cp. vol. iv p. 23. « Ibid., vol. vi, p. 92. 

10 Ibid., vol. iv, p. 209. ” Ibid., vol. vi, p. 220. Ibid., vol. vi, p. 2x1. 

" Ibid., vol. ii, p. 278. 14 Ibid., vol. vi, p. 106, 

»* Ibid., vol. vi, p. 115. 16 Ibid., vol. v, p. 331. 



WELTANSCHAUUNG OF ALEXANDER HERZEN 703 

Herzen’s exultation over his vision of Russia’s revolutionary future is 
seldom chilled by the cold touch of doubt. 

‘Wc perhaps ask for too much and shall get nothing. That may be so, 
but yet we do not despair .’ 1 

He seems naively blind to the trenchancy of Western comments on the 
Russian ethos, which he records en passant. ‘You Russians are either the 
most absolute slaves of your Tsar or . . . anarchists, and it follows from 
that that it will be a long time before you arc free’, the conservative and 
monarchist-minded Due dc Noailles once remarked to Herzen. 1 ‘I tell 
you what, gentlemen: Hard as it may be for us with the Russian Govern¬ 
ment, anyway our position under it is better than what these socialist 
fanatics are preparing for us’, declared the Polish emigre Demontowicz 
after prolonged arguments with the Russian Emigre Bakunin. 1 

Herzen is not dismayed by the prospect, which he foresees, of a head- 
on collision between a revolutionary Russia and a conservative West. 

‘Our classic ignorance of the Western European will be productive of 
a good deal of harm; race hatreds and bloody collisions will develop from 
it later on . 4 . . . Much hatred yet will be engendered and much blood yet 
will flow' through this difference in the two stages of growth and educa¬ 
tion 5 . . . from “the conflict of these two different forms of culture ”.’ 6 



IX. B (ii) (c) 2, ANNEX 

SICILIAN LIGHT ON ROMAN ORIGINS 

In rejecting as a professional pedigree-maker’s fake the story, immortal¬ 
ized by Virgil, that the ancestors of the Romans were refugees from a 
foundering Minoan World who had been cast up on the coast of Italy 
by the same tornado that stranded the Philistines on the coast of Syria, 
we need not rule out the possibility that the Romans may in fact have 
been descended from immigrants of a later date. 

This possibility is suggested by a consideration of the linguistic map 
of Italy in the period between the establishment of the Greek and 
Etruscan settlements on Italian ground and the subsequent Latinization 
of the Peninsula as a result of a Roman conquest. In the intervening age, 
* languages of the Latin type were spoken by three peoples: the Sicel 
natives of Sicily, 1 the Ligurians in the North-Western Appennines and 
the Maritime Alps, 1 and the Latins and Falisci in the lower basin of the 
River Tiber. The rest of the Italian Peninsula, apart from the Greek and 
Etruscan settlements, was occupied in that age by peoples speaking 
other languages who would appear to have spilled over into Italy from 
the north-east in three successive waves. A wave of Umbrian-spcakers 
had reached the west coast both north and south of Latium; for Umbrian 
dialects were spoken by the untamed Volscians (‘marshmen’) in the 
Pomptinc swamps, as well as by the natives of an Etruria where, under 
an alien ascendancy, the largest river in the land testified to the nationality 
of the subject population by continuing to bear the name Umbro 
(Ombrone). Behind the Umbrian-speakers stood the Oscan-speakcrs, 
and behind these the Illyrian-speaking peoples of Venetia, Apulia, and 
Northern Calabria. 

The general configuration of this linguistic map suggests that the 
speakers of languages of the Latin type in this age were survivors of an 
earlier wave of immigrants into Italy who had been pushed out south- 
westward into Sicily beyond the Straits of Messina and north-westward 
into a Ligurian highland fastness by three waves following in their 
wake; but this interpretation still leaves to be explained the presence of 
a Latin-speaking population in the open country of Latium. How are 
we to account for this Latin enclave in an elsewhere Umbrian and Oscan 

* The fragmentary surviving relics of the Sicel language have been presented and dis¬ 
cussed by R. S. Conway in The Cambridge Ancient History\ vol. iv (Cambridge 1926, 
University Press), pp. 436-7; by J. Whatmough in The Foundations 0] Roman Italy 
(London 1937, Methuen), pp. 365-6; and by T. J. Dunbabin in The Western Greeks 
(Oxford 1948, Clarendon Press), pp. 189-00. As it appears to the writer of this Study, 
the evidence proves conclusively that the Sicels’ mother tongue was virtually identical 
with Latin, and that it can be classed at any rate as a language belonging to the same 
sub-group as Latin within an Italic family in which the other two sub-groups were the 
Oscan and the Umbrian. 

2 The relics of the Ligurian language have been presented and discussed by Conway 
in loc. cit., pp. 433-5, a, ? < * Whatmough in op. cit., pp. 129-30. Whatmough agrees 
with Conway that Ligurian is an Indo-European language of Sicel affinities, and, pace 
Whatmough’s judgement that it is not a member of either the Italic or the Celtic family, 
the present writer ventures the opinion that Ligurian, os well as Sicel, will turn out to 
be an Italic language of the Latin sub-group. 



SICILIAN LIGHT ON ROMAN ORIGINS 705 
Central Italy, just beyond the south-eastern limits of the Umbrian 
territory that had been occupied by the Etruscans ? We may find a clue 
to the puzzle if we turn our eyes for a moment to a point just beyond the 
opposite extremity of Etruria, along the coast to the north-west of the 
mouth of the River Arno. 

Here, at the eastern end of the Italian Riviera, we find four place- 
names—not of Roman mintage, and therefore presumably ante-dating 
the Roman conquest—that are identical with the principal place-names 
in the Elymian country in the north-western corner of Sicily. The Gulf of 
Spe2ia is flanked by a Port of Eryx (the latter-day Lerici), bearing the 
name of the celebrated Sicilian mountain, and by a Portus Veneris, 
dedicated to the same goddess as the celebrated temple of Aphrodite on 
the Sicilian mountain’s flank. Again, about half-way between the Gulf 
of Spczia and Genoa, the mouth of the River Labonia (Lavagna) is 
flanked on one side by a Segesta (the latter-day Sestri Levante) and on 
the other by an Entella (still commemorated in the name of a local 
stream). This fourfold correspondence between place-names in Sicily 
and on the Riviera can hardly be accidental; we cannot reject the in¬ 
ference that the places known by these four names in Liguria had been 
called after the four places with identical names in Sicily, or vice versa; 
and the probability that the group of names in Liguria was derived from 
the group in Sicily is indicated by the fact that in Liguria, as in Sicily, 
the mountain-name appears in the Graecized form ‘Eryx’ and not in a 
Ligurian equivalent of the Latin form ‘verruca’ (‘peak’), which we 
should expect to find surviving here if the name had originated in Liguria 
and had been carried thence to Sicily. 

The reappearance of these four Sicilian names on the Riviera thus 
indicates that the Sicilian Elymi had planted settlements here at some 
date; and this date must be earlier than the Roman Age; for the Romans 
did not draw on their Graecized Sicilian subjects for the colonists whom 
they planted at Luna and other points in and around Liguria in and 
after the second century b.c. The hypothesis that most naturally suggests 
itself is that these Elymian settlements along the Eastern Riviera were 
part of the older colonizing movement that had created Magna Graccia 
and Etruria. We know that the Elymi were particularly receptive to 
Hellenic influences, besides being particularly hard pressed by the 
encroachments of Greek intruders on their territory. It might well have 
occurred to them to relieve the pressure of population in a shrunken 
homeland in Sicily by resorting to the Greek expedient that had borne 
so hard upon the Elymians themselves. Why should they not follow 
the Greeks’ example by colonizing some stretch of West Mediterranean 
coastline where the natives were sufficiently backward to be easily 
subdued or expelled? If, at some stage in the colonizing movement that 
was in process from the eighth to the sixth century B.C., the Elymians 
did join in the game, an obvious field for them to choose would have 
been the Riviera between the north-western outposts of the Etruscans 
and the eastern outposts of the Massiliots. The Italian Riviera had a 
promising commercial hinterland in the upper basin of the River Po, 
and thus in their general location the four Elymian settlements were 

B 2898 vm a a 



706 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
well placed—though the Hannibalic War was eventually to demonstrate 
that, in overlooking the superlative advantages of Genoa, the Elymian 
prospectors had been no less blind than those Mcgarian Greek pros¬ 
pectors who passed by the vacant site of Byzantium in order to settle 
at Calchcdon. 1 

The Elymian settlers along the Eastern Riviera had, however, at any 
rate chosen a location where they could count on a ‘natural frontier’ to 
safeguard them against Etruscan encroachments; for, as late as the time 
of the Hannibalic War, the lower valley of the Arno was a pestilential 
swamp, which Hannibal’s army found it almost as difficult to traverse as 
the Alps, and which cost their leader the loss of an eye. The Etruscans’ 
Latin neighbours at the opposite extremity of the Marcmma likewise 
enjoyed the benefit of a protective river-barrier which enabled the 
Romans to repulse the Etruscan war-lord Lars Porsenna’s attempt to 
reconquer them after they had expelled their Etruscan tyrant Tarquin. 
On the analogy of the Elymian settlements along the Riviera, is it too 
rash a conjecture to guess that the cluster of Latin-speaking communi¬ 
ties adjoining the lower course of the Tiber, which appear on the 
linguistic map of Italy in the period intervening between the coloniza¬ 
tion of Magna Graecia and Etruria and the Roman conquest, were not 
relics of an aboriginal deposit of peoples speaking languages of the Latin 
type, but were colonists from Sicily who had succeeded in thrusting 
themselves into a promising site in between the farthest south-eastern 
outpost of Etruria and the farthest north-western outpost of Magna 
Graecia ? 

A scrutiny of the map of Latium and the adjoining Faliscan country 
confirms the impression that this Tiberine enclave of Latin-speaking 
population was not, like the Volscians’ marshes or the Hcrnicans’ 
crags, a fastness in which a hard-pressed native people had managed to 
hold out against aggressive assailants, but was a ‘bridgehead’ established 
by invaders from overseas who had made a landing vi et armis on the 
beaches just south-east of Ostia. On this reconstruction of an unrecorded 
chapter of history, the Falisci would be a vanguard of the Sicel invaders 
who rashly pushed up the Tiber Valley and settled on its right bank, 
only to fall permanently under the domination of Etruscans on whose 
preserves they were trespassing. A more cautious Latin rear-guard would 
have confined its encroachments within an area covered by a number of 
natural frontiers: the river-line constituted by the courses of the Lower 
Tiber and its tributary the Anio, the south-western spurs of the Sabine 
Mountains, and the natural system of fortifications provided by the 
rampart-like slopes of the craters-within-craters known as the Alban 
Hills. The fortresses built by the Latin interlopers to protect this peri¬ 
meter would have been Rome, Tibur, Praencstc, and Alba Longa. 

On this showing, there would be a sense in which Rome had been 
‘an Hellenic city’ 2 already before the first stone of her material structure 
had been laid, since it would have been an Hellenic example that had 
inspired her Sicel founders to join in a colonizing movement that in the 
eighth, seventh, and sixth centuries B.c. was planting the west coast of 
* See II. ii. 43-48. a See V. v. 212, n. 3. 



SICILIAN LIGHT ON ROMAN ORIGINS 707 
Italy, from a Chalcidian Rhcgium on the Straits of Messina to an 
Elymian Entella on the Riviera, with sea-borne settlers of Greek, 
Etruscan and Sicilian origin. 

This inference from a linguistic map has some support in the Roman 
literary tradition, for Siculi or Sicani are located in Latium by both 
Virgil and Pliny. Siculi are named by Pliny in a list of early peoples of 
Latium , 1 and Sicani in a list of ‘carnem in Monte Albano soliti accipere 
populi Albcnses .’ 2 Sicani are thrice enumerated by Virgil among the 
peoples already established in Latium before the advent of Aeneas . 1 In 
the first and the third of these passages of the Aeneid, these Latian 
Sicani are associated with the Rutuli and the Aurunci, and in the third 
passage these three peoples are described as being one another's 
neighbours. 

This Virgilian tradition of a Sican clement in the population of 
Latium is, of course, quite independent of the talc of a Trojan invasion 
of Latium which is the main theme of the Aeneid. Indeed, Virgil makes 
his Latian Sicans join with the other old inhabitants of Latium in 
attempting to resist the Trojan intruders. While continuing to reject 
the tale of a Trojan settlement in Latium as fictitious, we may perhaps 
accept the tradition of a Sican settlement in Latium with the amend¬ 
ment that these Latian Sicans were colonists from Sicily who had not 
settled in Latium before the eighth century b.c. at the earliest. 

1 Plinius Secundus, C.: Hisloria Naturalis, Book III, chap, v (ix), § 56. 

2 Op. cit., Book III, chap, v (ix), § 60. 

J See Aeneid, Book VII, 1 . 795; Book VIII, I. 3 a8; Book XI, L 3 » 7 - 



IX. C (i), ANNEX 

‘ASIA’ AND ‘EUROPE’: FACTS AND 
FANTASIES 

In the introduction to his history of a concatenation of encounters 
culminating in a collision between the Achacmenian Empire and the 
Hellenic World, 1 Herodotus professes to reproduce a Persian exposition 
of the motive that had impelled the Achacmenidae to take the offensive 
against the Hellenes, and of a theory of history which was the ground of 
the Persians’ Hellenophobia according to this story. The alleged motive 
is one of the characteristic points of honour in the barbarian Weltan¬ 
schauung of the Heroic Age. The Persians, according to Herodotus, 
believed that they had inherited a blood feud in which the latest entry 
in the running account" was a still unavenged injury, suffered by pre¬ 
decessors of theirs, which it was their moral duty to requite. The alleged 
theory in virtue of which the Persians arc represented by Herodotus as 
believing themselves to be saddled with this obligation is as sophisticated 
as the blood-feud motif is primitive. The Persians, according to Hero¬ 
dotus, felt it incumbent on themselves to exact vengeance from the 
Hellenes for the siege and sack of Troy because, on the Persian theory 
of history, the Persians’ own encounter with the Hellenes, the Trojans’ 
encounter with them, and the Colchians’ and the Phoenicians’ encounters 
with them before that, were so many incidents in an historic feud be¬ 
tween Asia and Europe. The hypothetical continuity of the feud would 
make these incidents historically continuous with one another and so 
create a moral solidarity between successive representatives of Asia in 
this quarrel of the continents. 

The wrong inflicted on Asia which the Persians arc declared by 
Herodotus to have felt it to be their duty to avenge was the Hellenes’ 
wanton offence of retaliating for the abduction of a princess by waging 
a war of annihilation and thereby opening a new and unprecedentedly 
devastating chapter in the feud between Europe and Asia. 2 

‘Up to this point the injuries that they had inflicted on one another had 
been confined to abductions, but at this juncture the Hellenes put them¬ 
selves monstrously in the wrong. They committed an unprovoked act of 
military aggression against Asia when the Asiatics were still innocent of 
any such outrage against Europe. . . . The Persians claim that “they” 
(identifying themselves with the Asiatics) had let the abductions pass 
without taking any notice, whereas the Hellenes had exacted vengeance 
for the abduction of a Lacedaemonian princess by collecting a great 
expeditionary force and then invading Asia and destroying Priam’s 
empire. From that date, the Persians say, “they” had always regarded 
the Hellenic World as being in a state of war with “them”—the point 
being that the Persians lay claim to Asia and to the non-Hellenic Asiatic 
peoples as their own domain, while they think of Europe and the Hellenic 
World as being an alter orbis. This is the Persians’ version of the course of 

* This Herodotean concatenation of encounters has been discussed cn pp. 454-60, 
above. 

* The 'chain-reactions’ that 'in real life’ arc apt to be set in motion by such wanton 
act* of hybris have been discussed on pp. 454-63, above. 



•ASIA’ AND ‘EUROPE’ 709 

historical events: they see in the sack of Troy the origin of their own 
quarrel with the Hellenes .’ 1 

If any of Herodotus’s Persian contemporaries had ever taken Hellenic 
life and letters seriously enough to think of reading this Asiatic Greek 
historian’s introduction to his story of an oecumenical concatenation 
of encounters, the Persian explorer of an alien Hellenic mental world 
would assuredly have been taken aback at finding his countrymen 
credited with the motive and the theory that Herodotus has here attri¬ 
buted to them. The authentic motive behind the Persians’ unsuccessful 
attempt, between 492 and 479 b.c., to conquer the then still independent 
residue of the Hellenic World was certainly not to avenge legendary 
wrongs supposedly inflicted on Trojan victims by Achaean aggressors. 
The number of Persians who had heard of ‘the Trojan War' cannot have 
exceeded the number who were familiar with the epic poetry of their 
Asiatic Greek subjects , 2 and a Persian who knew Homer must indeed have 

1 Herodotus, Book I, chaps. 4-5. Caricature is perhaps the best comment on this 
Herodotean reconstruction of the historical antecedents of the encounter between the 
Achaemenidae and the Hellenes. Let us imagine that, at a date still in the future at the 
time of writing, Continental Western Europe has been militarily overrun and politically 
subjugated by the Soviet Union and that Herodotus has returned to life to write the 
history of a consequent conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States. We 
can imagine him transposing this episode in an encounter between the Western and the 
Russian civilizations into terms of a ‘war of the worlds’ in which the Old World and the 
New World arc the perennial parties to an inter-mundane feud. 

'The Castilians', Herodotus might have written, 'were the authors of the original 
crime out of which this feud between the New World and the Old World arose. After 
wantonly drawing upon themselves the Envy of the Gods by venturing to make their 
way across an Ocean which no man-made ship had ever previously traversed, they pro¬ 
ceeded to provoke the Godhead further in another way by attacking and overthrowing 
the empires of the Aztecs and the Incas, when these legitimate sovereigns of the New 
World had never thought of committing aggression against the Old World on their part. 
The wrong thus inflicted on the New World by Castilian hands was avenged by the 
colonists planted there by the Castilians themselves and by the English, who rebelled 
against their mother oiuntries, and thereby put an end to the Old World’s dominion 
over the New World, in retaliation for the arbitrary action of a King of England named 
George III in imposing a tax in his American dominions on the importation of an old- 
world herb called tea, from which the colonists had learnt to brew a drink to take the 
place of wine. This re-establishment of American independence would have balanced 
the account between the two worlds if the equilibrium had not been upset again by the 
intervention of the United States in the World War of a . d . 1914-18. The Americans 
defend this intervention by arguing that they were acting in self-defence, on the ground 
that, if they had allowed the Germans to win that war, then the Germans, who are 
notoriously deficient in a sense of moderation, would never have been content with 
having made themselves masters of the Old World but would have proceeded to mobi¬ 
lize all the Old World’s resources for an attack upon the New World in which the United 
States would assuredly have lost her liberty. The Russians, on the other hand, argue 
that, in intervening in the affairs of the Old World, the United States was committing an 
act of aggression and that, since the overthrow of Germany in the Second World War, 
the duty of championing the cause of the Old World has fallen on Russia’s shoulder*. 
On this ground they maintain that their own recent occupation of the countries along 
the Atlantic seaboard of the Old World, facing the United States, was not an act of 
aggression on Russia’s part but was a necessary measure of precaution, taken in the 
occupied countries' own interests, to forestall a further act of aggression against the Old 
World which was to be expected from a United States which had committed two such 
crimes already. This, then, was the origin of the Great Russo-American War, in which 
all the forces of the Old World and the New World were arrayed against one another.' 

1 It is perhaps worth noting that the Herodotean interpretation of 'the Trojan War* 
as an episode in a feud between ‘Europe’ and ’Asia’ has no warrant in the Homeric Epic. 
The authors of the two catalogues of the opposing forces (Iliad, Book II, 11 . 484-759 and 
11 . 811-77) describe an Achaean confederacy astride the Aegean making war on a Trojan 
coalition astride the Dardanelles; and, whatever the relation between these passages and 
other parts of the poem may be held to be, there is at any rate no inconsistency between 
them on this particular point of political geography. 



7X0 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
been a rara avis. In another context 1 we have already observed that the 
authentic motive for Darius’s forward policy was, not any romantic 
impulse to pursue an imaginary feud, but the prosaic need to find a 
tenable north-west frontier for the Achaemenian Empire in lieu of an 
existing line which had been proved to be untenable by the painfully 
cogent experience of the Asiatic Greek and Carian revolt of 499-494 b.c. 
And, as for the theory of a perennial feud between ‘Asia’ and ‘Europe’, 
there is no serious evidence that the Persians of the Achaemenian Age 
ever applied to such mundane matters as Geography, History, and 
Civilization a capacity for thinking in abstract general terms which they 
displayed in the transcendental sphere of a Zoroastrian theology that 
concerned itself, not with a merely terrestrial Habitable World, but 
with the Universe, and that made its grand dichotomy, not between 
Asia and Europe or between Orientalism and Hellenism, but between 
Light and Darkness and between Good and Evil. 

The motive and the theory that Herodotus attributes to the Persians 
were both manifestly invented by some Hellenic mind. The Hellenic 
inventor was not Herodotus himself, for Asia is already a current 
synonym for the Achaemenian Empire in Aeschylus’s Persae , 2 which 
was produced for the first time in 472 B.C., and the same antithesis 
between Asia and Europe reappears in Hellenic medical works of the 
Hippocratcan school which were probably written in Herodotus’s own 
generation. Nor docs Herodotus himself explicitly endorse an interpre¬ 
tation of history which he has borrowed from Hellenic predecessors 
without acknowledgement and has attributed to Persian contemporaries 
without permission. Yet, in effect, ‘the Feud between Europe and Asia’ 
is the dominant and unifying theme of Herodotus’s work, and the master¬ 
liness of his workmanship is largely responsible for the subsequent vogue 
of this fifth-century Hellenic fantasy of a ‘quarrel of the continents’. 

This fantasy had been begotten when some imaginative Hellenic 
mind had given a revolutionary change of meaning to the two traditional 
Hellenic geographical names ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’ by transferring them 
from the mariner’s chart to the publicist’s political map and to the 
sociologist’s diagram of the habitats of cultures. This feat of imagination 
had been unluckily inspired; for, though Herodotus was to turn it to 
such good literary- account, it was, all the same, a fantasy that had 
turned sense into nonsense. The mariner’s navigational distinction be¬ 
tween ‘Asia’ and ‘Europe’, as far as it went, could have had as long a life 
as the physical geography of the Quaternary Age of the planet’s geolo¬ 
gical history, whereas a constellation of political forces in which the 
waterway between ‘Asia’ and ‘Europe’ coincided with a political frontier 
had never arisen, from the dawn of recorded human history down to the 
time of writing of the present work, except during the two brief periods 
547 - 5 I 3 B - c - 3 an d 386-334 b.c., when this waterway constituted the 
north-west frontier of the Achaemenian Empire. 4 As for the identifica- 

1 Sec pp. 43 ©- 5 . above. 

1 Sec, tor example, 11. 12, 6i, 249, 270, 549, 584, 763, and 929. 

1 See p. 43a, above. 

4 It is true that the frontier of the Lydian Empire had gradually approximated towards 
his water-line in the course of the century preceding Cyrus’* conquest of Lydia in 



‘ASIA’ AND 'EUROPE' 7xx 

tion of the mariner’s ‘continents’ with the domains of diverse cultures, 
this was, if possible, even more fantastic than the political misapplica¬ 
tion of these nautical terms; for the historian cannot lay his finger on any 
period at all, however brief, in which there was any significant cultural 
diversity between ‘Asiatic’ and ‘European’ occupants of the all but 
contiguous opposite banks of a tenuous inland waterway which would 
have continued to be the fresh-water river that it originally had been if 
Poseidon had not high-handedly enlarged his own domain by a mighty 
trident-stroke that had brought the salt water flooding in, up the rift 
which the god had cleft, from the mouth of the Aegean to the head of 
the Sea of Azov . 1 

Whatever the ultimate origins of the names ‘Asia’ and ‘Europe’ may 
have been , 2 their usage as a pair of antithetical but mutually complemen¬ 
tary physiographical expressions must have been first brought into cur¬ 
rency by navigators of the Aegean who had succeeded in mastering the 
challenge of ‘the estranging sea ’ 3 and who had consequently become 
disagreeably aware of limitations set by terra firma to their freedom of 
movement in an element which they had now made their own. 

It is the mariner’s nomenclature that first draws the distinction be¬ 
tween his friends the islands, which offer him ports of call and harbours 
of refuge, and his enemies the 'continents’ whose continuous coastline 
disappointingly bars his passage, as gulf after gulf which promises to be 
a strait turns out to be a cul-de-sac. The Hellenic mariner who had in¬ 
herited a mastery of the Aegean from Minoan predecessors could not 
fail to note and name the two continents that proved to set an eastern 
and a western bound to his sea-faring. Feeling his way northwards along 
the Asiatic and the European coast of the mainland, he summoned up 
the courage to hazard the passage of three successive straits—the 

547 B.C.; but even Croesus, the last and widest-ruling of the Kings of Lydia, had never 
succeeded in extending his dominions up to the continental Asiatic water-front nil along 
the line. Miletus, the leading Continental Asiatic Greek city of the day, ns well as the 
non-Greek-speaking Hellenic country; Lycia, had successfully maintained their in¬ 
dependence until, after the fall of Sardis, they had been compelled to submit to Lydia's 
Persian conquerors. s See I. i. 326, n. 2. 

1 The Aegean mariner’s term ‘Asia’ to denote the continent which set the eastward 
limit to his freedom of movement in his own element appeared to have been derived from 
the local name for a marsh or watermcad in the valley of the River Caysier, presumably 
somewhere not far from its mouth (Iliad, Book 11, 1 . 461); and the documents retrieved 
by Western archaeologists from the wreck of the Hittitc imperial archives at Boshaz- 
aal'eh indicated that this Asian mead was called after the thirteenth-century West 
Anatolian principality A 44 uwa. The etymology of the name ‘Europe’ was obscure. It 
might be a Greek travesty of the Phoenician word ‘ertb (corresponding to the Arabic 
gharb) meaning the dark quarter where the Sun sets in the West; or, if it was not a tech¬ 
nical term borrowed by Greek mariners from their Phoenician confreres, but was a native 
Greek word, it might signify the ‘broad faced’ terra firma which had proved itself to 
be a ‘continent’ by stretching away continuously without a break through which a ship 
could thread its passage, in contrast to the islands of the Archipelago round whose 
circumscribed coasts the Aegean mariner had learnt readily to find his way. This literal 
interpretation of the word is perhaps too rational to be convincing, and another possi¬ 
bility is that the Continent of Europe may have derived its name from a goddess who 
was ‘broad-faced’ because she was bovine. ‘The Tyrian princess Europa’ (Herodotus, 
Book I, chap. 2) who had been abducted, according to the Hellenic myth, by Zeus in 
the guise of a bull seems likely to have been a goddess in the guise of a cow, and we may 
identify her, according to our fancy, with ’the cow-faced Hera’ or with the goddess 
incarnate in a heifer whom the Hellenes knew as Io and the Egyptians as Hathor. 

J The genesis of the Minoan Civilization has been traced back to a victorious response 
to this physical challenge in I. i. 323-30. 



712 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
Dardanelles, the Bosphorus, and the Straits of Kerch—where Asia and 
Europe all but clasped hands and threatened to crush between their 
fingers the audacious ship that ventured to run the gauntlet. For each of 
these daring transits the adventurous Hellenic mariners of the eighth 
and seventh centuries b.C. were rewarded by finding their way into a new 
Aegean in the shape of another inland sea; but, when they had thus 
successively won their way from the Aegean into the Marmara, from the 
Marmara into the Black Sea, and from the Black Sea into the Sea of 
Azov, and had ascended the River Don to the head of fluvial navigation, 
they there at last came to a point where their own clement finally failed 
them and where the opposing continents, which had so far thrice 
alternately converged and receded, at length lost their separate identities 
by melting into one. 

Even on the plane of physical geography, the mariner’s distinction 
between ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’ made sense only so far as the physical effect 
of Poseidon’s trident-stroke extended. The distinction could neither 
have been invented nor even have been understood by a Nomad who 
in his own peculiar element could range at will over a steppe which 
afforded him passage without any appreciable break—when once he had 
made his discovery of the waterless Dardanelles called the Zungarian 
Gap—all the way between the eastern slopes of the Carpathians and the 
western slopes of the Khingan Range. The distinction drawn between 
an Asiatic and a European continent in an Hellenic nautical nomencla¬ 
ture would have been equally unintelligible to the Eurasian Nomad’s 
northern neighbour and adversary the Eurasian peasant, whose element 
was the belt of Black Earth extending from the eastern slopes of the 
Carpathians to the western slopes of Altai. The sedentary cultivator of 
the soil would have agreed with the nomadic herdsman in dismissing, 
as the ineptitude that it was, an arbitrary division of his realm between 
two continents invented in another region of the globe by alien seamen 
for navigational purposes; and an Hcrodotcan ‘quarrel of the continents’ 
would have been brushed aside, as a meaningless irrelevancy, by a pair 
of landsmen who were both intent on Cain’s and Abel’s historic conflict 
between ‘the Desert’ and ‘the Sown’. 1 

The boundary between the Hellenic mariners’ continents of Asia and 
Europe was a navigable waterway, and this continuous channel of salt 
water which carried their ships from the Aegean through the Dardanelles 
and the Marmara and the Bosphorus and the Black Sea and the Straits 
of Kerch came to an end at the head of the Sea of Azov. This last link 
in a chain of inland seas still served to demarcate an Asia and a Europe 
from one another; 1 but beyond that point the Hellenic geographers 
never succeeded in laying their finger on any inland feature in the 
physical landscape that could offer any convincing line for partitioning 
an indivisible Eurasia which no Poseidonian trident-stroke had here 
cleft asunder; and this problem of drawing a land-frontier between 
Asia and Europe proved equally baffling to Modern Western geo- 

» See III. iii. 7-22. 

1 The Sea of Amv was the boundary between Asia and Europe according to Hippo¬ 
crates, Influences of Atmosphere, Water, and Situation, chap. 13. 



‘ASIA’ AND ‘EUROPE’ 713 

graphcrs who had saddled themselves with this Hellenic intellectual 
incubus as one of the penalties of profiting by a Modern Western 
Renaissance of the corpus of Hellenic culture . 1 

It was in vain that these Hellenomane Western geographers shifted 
an imaginary boundary eastward from the line of the Don to the lines of 
the Volga and the Caucasus, and subsequently followed the Russian 
Empire’s military advance into Transcaucasia in order to find a boundary 
between the continents of Europe and Asia in Russia’s fluctuating 
political frontiers vis-a-vis Turkey and Persia . 2 Even this desperate 
expedient of equating the bounds of a continent with transitory political 
frontiers was of no avail to the perplexed geographers in the formidably 
broad torso of Eurasia between the north shore of the Caspian and the 
south shore of the Arctic Ocean; for on this front the political frontier of 
Russia had long since rolled on eastward up to the shores of the Pacific 
Ocean, and to have stretched the Continent of Europe, in Russia’s train, 
to extend as far as Okhotsk and Vladivostok would merely have multi¬ 
plied the geographers’ embarrassments. They were reduced to dissecting 
the living body politic of Russia into an imaginary ‘Russia-in-Europe’ 
and ‘Russia-in-Asia’ along the unconvincing line of the Ural River and 
the Ural Mountains, and garnishing their fictitious ‘Russia-in-Asia’ 
with a non-existent political capital at Irkutsk for the edification of 
school-children who would feel their geographical education incomplete 
if they could not name a capital for every so-called state on the list 
that they were given to learn by heart. Thereafter the geographers 
belatedly discovered that the Ural Mountains which they had made into 
a household word were no more noticeable a feature in the physical 
landscape than the Chiltern Hills , 5 and that this vaunted physical barrier 
between Europe and Asia was not strongly enough pronounced even to 
serve as a boundary between one local province of the Russian Empire 
and another . 4 

The geographers’ dissection of Eurasia into a ‘Russia-in-Europe’ and 
a ‘Russia-in-Asia’ was almost surpassed in fatuity by their dissection of 
the Ottoman Empire into a 'Turkey-in-Europc (capital: Constantinople)’ 
and a ‘Turkey-in-Asia (capital: Smyrna)’; and they could not save their 
reputation by pointing out that ‘European’ and ‘Asiatic’ Turkey, unlike 
‘European’ and ‘Asiatic’ Russia, were physically demarcated from one 
another by Poseidon’s salt-water-filled rift . 5 The geographers’ error here 
lay in attempting to translate a serviceable piece of navigational nomen¬ 
clature into political and cultural terms. In the daily life of Hellenes 
whose element was the sea, the salt water was a bond between continents 

1 This is acknowledged by Oskar Halccki in The Limits and Divisions of European 
History (I-ondon 1950. Sheed and Ward), p. 8s. 

1 On this political principle of demarcating continents, the Transcaucasian districts 
Qars, Ardahan, and Batum 'changed continents’ twice within forty years—from Asia 
to Europe in a.d. 1878 and back again from Europe to Asia in a.d. 1918. 

J On the 23rd January, 1930, the writer of this Study traversed the Urals tn route 
across Eurasia from Vladivostok to Ostcnd via Sverdlovsk (Yekaterinburg), and found 
them as unobtrusive as the Chiltems on the road from London to Oxford via High 
Wycombe. 

* This is acknowledged by Halccki, op. cit., p. 86. 

s Halecki, in op. cit., pp. 75-76, acknowledges that the Straits do not sunder Europe 
from Asia Minor. 


Aa2 



7 i 4 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
which were barriers to intercourse by navigation; and in the daily life of 
latter-day inhabitants of Constantinople the Bosphorus was the central 
thoroughfare of a city bestriding it. The twentieth-century Turkish 
business man who worked ever}’ day in Pcra and slept every night in 
Scutari would have been astonished to hear that the thalweg of the 
familiar metropolitan waterway which he crossed in a penny steamer 
twice a day on the way to and fro between his dormitory and his office 
marked the boundary between two of the major divisions of the land- 
surface of the globe, and that this thread of ‘salt estranging sea’ was so 
potent an insulator that Scutari, Haydar Pasha, and the other ‘Asiatic’ 
quarters of the Bosphoran imperial city had a closer affinity with Calcutta 
and Peking than they had with Pera and Istanbul, while conversely 
Istanbul and Pera had a closer affinity with a ‘European’ Paris and 
Madrid than they had with Haydar Pasha and Scutari. 

No citizen of Constantinople could ever have been persuaded to 
swallow such nonsense; for the Republic of Turkey which bestrode the 
narrow seas between Asia and Europe at the time of writing was only 
the latest of a series of states with the same geographical configuration. 
In the political geography of the Ottoman Empire, the East Roman 
Empire, the Roman Empire itself since the age of Diocletian and Con¬ 
stantine, and the abortive empire of Alexander the Great’s local suc¬ 
cessor Lysimachus, the waterway between the Aegean and the Black Sea 
had proved itself to be the body politic’s spinal cord by attracting the 
site of the seat of government to its shores. Lysimachus had laid out a 
capital on the Dardanelles, in the neck of the Gallipoli Peninsula, for an 
empire which he had momentarily extended to the Danube in one 
direction and to the Taurus in the other. The capital of the Roman 
Empire had gravitated from the banks of the Tiber to the shores of the 
Marmara, 1 and Diocletian had governed the Hellenic World from 
Nicomedia (Ismid) 2 before Constantine had converted Byzantium into 
the Second Rome which an East Roman Empire and an Ottoman 
Empire successively adopted as their capital. 

When the East Roman Imperial Government at Constantinople was 
overthrown by Western Christian adventurers in a . d . 1204, the Greek 
Orthodox Christian resistance movement which immediately declared 
itself at half a dozen places in the provinces found its most effective base 
of operations at Nicaea, a provincial city which combined the political 
advantage of proximity to the East Roman Empire’s central waterway 
with the military advantage of being fortified by Nature as well as by 
art. Nicaea, like the landward face of Istanbul, was encased in a triple 
line of fortifications; a ring of mountains encircled the inland basin in 
which the city lay; and the western half of this basin was filled by a lake 
which drained through a defile into the Gulf of Cius (Gemlik) and thence 
into the Sea of Marmara. The Greek Orthodox Christian principality 
which was established at Nicaea in a.d. 1204 by the refugee patriot 
Theodore Lascaris gave a practical demonstration of the working of local 
laws of political geography which was not lost upon the ‘Osmanlis 
when, 122 years later, these Turkish Muslim empire-builders gained 
« See VI. vii. 119-20. * Sec VI. vii. 217-18. 



•ASIA* AND 'EUROPE’ 715 

possession of a neighbouring and comparable site at Brusa . 1 The 
princes of Nicaea demonstrated between a . d . 1204 and a . d . 1261 that 
a provisional capital within a stone’s throw of the Asiatic shore of the 
Marmara afforded a practicable base of operations for a conquest 
of Thrace and Macedonia which could then be rounded off by the 
capture of a straits-bestriding empire’s inevitable ultimate capital at 
Constantinople. 

Nicaea and Brusa successively fulfilled their destinies by reinstating 
Constantinople as the capital of an empire which these two temporary 
queens of the narrow seas had built up for the benefit of their still more 
auspiciously situated sister on the Bosphorus; but a twentieth-century 
Republic of Turkey, whose capital was not Constantinople but Ankara, 
had other predecessors which, like itself and unlike the Ottoman and 
Palacologan empires, had bestridden the narrow seas without planting 
the scat of government on their shores. The Dardanelles were thus be¬ 
stridden first by the Seleucid and then by the Pergamene successor-state 
of the abortive empire of Lysimachus. Though both these Hellenic 
empires, like the latter-day Republic of Turkey that emerged from the 
wreckage of the Ottoman Empire after the World War of a . d . 1914-18 
and like their own predecessor the Achaemenian Empire, were land- 
powers centred on Asiatic ground and not sea-powers centred on the 
Straits, the water-boundary between the continents of Asia and Europe 
was too slight a barrier to provide them with ‘a natural frontier’; and 
they both found it advisable, for the defence of their Asiatic dominions, 
to hold a European bridgehead across the water. 

The salt-water boundary between the mariner’s continents Asia and 
Europe was as insignificant a feature on the cultural, ecclesiastical, and 
ethnographical maps as it was on the political map. 

The Aegean Sea was bestridden by the Hellenic World and by the 
main body of the Orthodox Christian World since the first emergence of 
each of these two societies, and by the Iranic Muslim World since the 
Ottoman conquest of Rumelia in the fourteenth century of the Christian 
Era. In the internal structure of the sea-faring Hellenic Society in its pre- 
Alexandrine Age, the waters of the Aegean proved themselves to be, not 
a barrier, but a bond by knitting together an Asiatic and a European 
half of an indivisible Hellas as a European and an American half of an 
indivisible Western World were knit together by the conductive waters 
of the Atlantic in the ocean-faring age of Western history'; and, when 
we turn to the ecclesiastical map, we find that the water-boundary 
between Asia and Europe was crossed by religious missionaries as 
readily as by military' conquerors. 

In his two day's’ voyage from Troas to Neapolis , 2 Saint Paul, as we 
have seen , 1 was following in the wake of Sclcucus Nicator and of Darius 
the Great’s lieutenant Mardonius; and, some thirteen hundred years 
later, Islam, in its turn, was propagated from Asia to Europe with equal 
facility by Ottoman disciples of the Prophet Muhammad who pursued 

« The Lascarids’ role as path-finders for the ‘Osmanlis has been noticed already in 
III. iii. 27. 

* Acts xvi. 11. > In VI. vii. 95-97- 



716 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
the missionary’s aim by the conqueror’s methods. In the history of the 
Eastern Orthodox Church the distinction between ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’ 
was not merely meaningless but was positively misleading. A division of 
the World’s land-surface into continents was inapplicable to the ecclesias¬ 
tical geography of a commonwealth of churches whose two oldest 
members were an ‘Asiatic’ Patriarchate of Antioch and an ‘African’ 
Patriarchate of Alexandria, and whose senior member was an Oecumeni¬ 
cal Patriarchate of Constantinople in which ‘Asiatic’ and ‘European’ 
sees were indissolubly associated with one another, while the largest 
and most powerful member of the group at the time of writing was a 
Patriarchate of Moscow whose ecclesiastical subjects were scattered over 
the face of an indivisible Eurasia from the shores of the Baltic Sea at 
Leningrad to the shores of the Pacific Ocean at Vladivostok. 

The linguistic map tells the same tale as the ecclesiastical, cultural, 
and political maps at which we have just glanced. In the spread of 
languages, as in the propagation of religions and cultures and the build¬ 
ing of empires, the narrow seas dividing an ‘Asia’ from a ‘Europe’ never 
proved to be a barrier and frequently provided a highway. The waters 
of the Aegean wafted the Greek language from the ‘European’ to the 
‘Asiatic’ side of this conductive sea at least as early as the age of the 
post-Minoan Vblkcrwandcrung (circa 1425-1125 B.C.). The Thracian¬ 
speaking peoples, who spread north-westward perhaps as far as Upper 
Silesia af ter they had broken out of the Great Western Bay of the 
Eurasian Steppe into the preserves of Homo Agricola , also spread south¬ 
eastward perhaps as far as North-Western Kurdistan 1 as easily as if the 
continuity of the hills and dales over which they drove their flocks had 
not been broken in this quarter by ‘the silver streaks’ of the Bosphorus 
and the Dardanelles. 

The ineffectiveness of the narrow seas as an obstacle to the spread of 
the Thracian-speaking peoples was attested by the appearance of the 
same Thracian tribal names on both the European and the Asiatic side. 
There were Thyni on the Ismid Peninsula, as well as in the Istranja 
Mountains overhanging the west shore of the Black Sea just across the 
Bosphorus. The Phrygians of the Anatolian Plateau and Bcbryces of 
the Qaramursal Peninsula on the Asiatic shore of the Marmara had left 
a rear-guard in Europe whose name might have passed into oblivion 2 
if these Macedonian Brygi had not once crossed the path of History by 
falling foul of the Persian Mardonius’s expeditionary force in 492 b.c. 3 
An equally obscure rear-guard of the Mysian occupants of the Asiatic 
hinterland of the Marmara survived in a nook between the Balkans and 
the Lower Danube to give their name to the Roman province Moesia. 
Conversely, the Dardani whose main body had dug themselves in on 
the watershed between the basins of the Morava and the Vardar in 
the heart of the Balkan Peninsula had thrown an advance party into the 

> See VI. vii. 604-5 and 660-2, and pp. 432-3, above. Herodotus (Book V, chap. 3) 
estimated that the Thracians were the most numerous of all peoples with the sole excep¬ 
tion of the Indians. 

1 Like the forgotten name of the European rear-guard of the Hittitcs who had blazed 
the trail for the Phrygians in the second millennium B.C. 

1 See Herodotus, Book VI, chap. 45. 



‘ASIA’ AND ‘EUROPE’ 717 

Troad across straits that preserved the record of this tribal migration by 
acquiring from it the name ‘Dardanelles’. 1 

The Thracian-speaking peoples’ migration across the Straits in and 
after a post-Minoan Volkerwanderung was emulated in the third century 
B.c. by the Celtic-speaking peoples when a sudden diversion of Mace¬ 
donian arms from the conquest of the barbarian hinterland of European 
Greece to the conquest of the Achaemenian Empire invited Celts, w’hom 
Philip’s aggression had provoked, to take a hand in the scramble for 
Alexander’s spoils; 2 and the ineffectiveness of the Straits as a barrier 

K st a Volkerwanderung was attested once again by the appearance 
e same tribal name Tectosages both in an Asiatic Galatia round 
Ankara and in a European Gaul round Toulouse. Even after the bar¬ 
barians’ well-worn highway across the Straits had been obstructed by 
the foundation of Constantinople, the Goths and the Slavs in turn 
followed the trail of the Hittites and the Phrygians and the Gauls out of 
Europe into Asia—as deportees, if not as conquerors—while in the 
opposite direction a legendary feat of the Mysi and the Teucri 3 was 
performed in real life by Ottoman Turkish migrants who conquered and 
colonized Rumclia from an Anatolian base of operations in the fourteenth 
century of the Christian Era. 

The nullity of the Narrow Seas as a cultural barrier is demonstrated 
so conclusively as to raise the question why it was that any Hellenes 
should ever have thought of trying to find a dividing line between an 
Hellenic and an Oriental World in a waterway which was actually the 
link between the Hellenic World’s Asiatic and European provinces. 
How did any school of Hellenic thought ever come to think of the 
Aegean Sea, which was in reality the central thoroughfare of Hellas, as 
demarcating her eastern boundary, when the effect of drawing a cultural 
frontier along this line was to declare the Asiatic half of Hellas to be out 
of the Hellenic World’s bounds? The explanation of this perverse cul¬ 
tural misinterpretation of a pair of nautical terms divorced from their 
original context is perhaps to be discovered in an abnormal and tem¬ 
porary political situation which placed the Asiatic and the European 
half of Hellas in an unfortunate relation with one another. 

During the period between the conquest of the Continental Asiatic 
Greek city-states by the Lydian Empire and the conquest of the Con¬ 
tinental European Greek city-states by Philip of Macedon, the European 
Greeks were able to look down upon the Asiatic Greeks for having lost 
their political independence, while the Asiatic Greeks could still look 
down upon the European Greeks on the score of their relative cultural 
backwardness; and it was not till after the opening of the post-Alcxan- 

’• The Dardani who founded Dardanu* on the Hellespont (‘Dardanelles’) were pro¬ 
bably an Illyrian-speaking, not a Thracian-speaking, people, but their passage of the 
Straits tells the same tale as the Thracian-speaking peoples’ migration across the same 
narrow seas. * See II. n. 281 and V. v. 209. 

1 See Herodotus, Book V, chap. 13, and Book VII, chap. 20. Presumably this legend 
was founded on the appearance of the tribal name Mysi-Mocsi in both North-Western 
Anatolia and the Balkan Peninsula. This pair of homonyms did commemorate a migra¬ 
tion; but the Hellenic observer who interpreted the evidence correctly thus far made the 
mistake of assuming that the Asiatic Mysi must have been the progenitors of the Euro¬ 
pean Moesi because they happened to be the less insignificant of these two sister tribes 
in the prc-Alcxandrine Age of Hellenic history. 



718 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

drine Age that the superficiality of this temporary differentiation between 
the two halves of Hellas once more became apparent. The truth was that 
the Continental Asiatic Greek city-states lost their political indepen¬ 
dence to a Hellenized Lydia some 250 years before the Continental 
European Greek city-states lost theirs to a Hellenized Macedonia just 
because the Asiatic Greeks were culturally so much more precocious 
than their European kinsmen that the radiation of their culture brought 
the adjoining sub-Hellenic Kingdom of Lydia up to a level of cultural 
efficiency at which it was politically capable of subjugating its Greek 
spiritual pastors and masters about a quarter of a millennium before the 
same stage was duly reached in the parallel history of the relations be¬ 
tween the European Greeks and the adjoining sub-Hellenic Kingdom of 
Macedon. In the meantime the European Greeks could find a facile 
psychological compensation for their oppressive consciousness of cul¬ 
tural inferiority to their Asiatic kinsmen by assuring themselves that the 
Asiatic Greeks’ loss of a political independence which the European 
Greeks had so far managed to retain was a proof that the Asiatic Greeks 
w'erc decadent, and that, if such decadence was the price of sophistica¬ 
tion, 1 then the European Greeks' own ingenuousness was, on balance, 
a happier state. 

This legend of the Asiatic Greeks being decadent was disproved, as 
we have noticed in another context, 2 by the sequel to Alexander’s over¬ 
throw’ of the Achaemenian Empire. This sequel showed that the eclipse 
of Asiatic Greece between 494 and 334 b.c. had been due to the peculiarly 
adverse situation in which the Asiatic Greeks had found themselves in 
the Achaemenian Age. The Achaemenian conquest of Lydia and her 
Continental Asiatic Greek dependencies in 547 B.c. meant something 
much more serious for the Asiatic Greeks than just the replacement of 
one foreign political ascendancy by another. It meant the substitution 

1 Ore •musing symptom of the Asiatic Greeks’ continuing intellectual vitality in the 
fifth century B.c. was the part played by Herodotus of Halicarnassus and by the Hippo- 
cratean school of medicine in Co* in propagating the legend that the politically sub¬ 
jugated Asiatic Greeks were in some sense beyond the pale of a Hellas who was nowhere 
quite fully herself except on the free soil of Europe. In putting into circulation a theory 
that was uncomplimentary to their own half of Hellas, the fifth-century Asiatic Greek 
men of science were giving evidence of their intellectual honesty, and at the same time 
they displayed their intellectual acumen in the discrimination with which they inter¬ 
preted the theory in the light of the facts. In the Hippocratean treatise on Influences of 
Atmosphere, Water, and Situation the thesis that the Asiatics are on the whole less brave, 
tough, hard-working, and spirited than the Europeans is based (chap, ta), not on some 
imaginary difference of magic virtue in the soil of the two continents, but on a general 
theory’ of a correlation between physical environment and human ithos (sec the passages 
quoted from op. cit. f chaps. 13 and 24, in II. i. 251-2). The Hippocratean argument 
starts from the premiss that in Asia the physical environment is more benign than it is 
in Europe; and, on the Hippocratean hypothesis that hard countries breed strong charac¬ 
ters, it follows that the inhabitants of Asia are less warlike than those of Europe on the 
whole (chaps. 12 and 23). At the same time the variety of the physical environment in 
Europe breeds a variety in the physique of the European peoples (chaps. 23 and 24), 
while a variety in the <thos of the Asiatic peoples is produced by the variety in Asiatic 
political conditions. The relative unwarlikeness of a majority of the Asiatics is due not 
merely to the relative benignity of the Asiatic physical environment but also to the 
political fact that most Asiatics live under a monarchical regime which deprives them of 
the incentive to exert themselves and risk their lives. 'The Hellenes and non-Hellenes 
in Asia who are not under despotic rule, but are free agents and struggle for their own 
benefit, are as warlike as any populations in the World’ (op. cit., chap. 16, quoted in II. 
i. 471. n. 1). * In IV. iv. 20-23. 



‘ASIA’ AND ‘EUROPE’ 719 

of Persian masters who were barbarian converts to an alien civilization 
for Lydian masters who had been the conquered Hellenes’ own cultural 
disciples; and the Asiatic Greeks merely kept on falling out of the frying 
pan into the fire when their Attic European kinsmen ‘liberated’ them 
from an Achaemcnian yoke in 479 b.c. and when their Spartan European 
kinsmen replayed this comedy by ‘liberating’ them from an Athenian 
yoke in the last phase of the Athcno-Pcloponnesian War of 431-404 B.c. 
in order to sell them back to the Achaemenidae in 386 B.c. As soon as 
the new order of the post-Alexandrine Age had released the Asiatic 
Greeks from the peculiar tribulations to which they had been subject 
during the preceding quarter of a millennium, the brilliant success with 
which they immediately rose to the occasion showed that their vitality 
was unimpaired. From 334 b.c. down to the generation of Justinian 
the Asiatic Greeks played as prominent a part in the life of the Hellenic 
World as they had played before the generation of Cyrus. 

In the post-Alexandrine Age of Hellenic history the thesis that the 
conflict between Hellenism and the Oriental civilizations was a feud 
between ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’ was once more so plainly contradicted by 
the facts that it fell into oblivion and ceased to work mischief, but the 
ghost of an erroneous Hellenic theory which had been effectively dis¬ 
credited by the logic of events in its Hellenic birthplace unfortunately 
returned to haunt a Modern Western World which had laid itself open 
to this visitation by its reception of the Hellenic culture in a fifteenth- 
century Italian Renaissance. In this new setting, History repeated itself 
with a singular exactness. A revival of the Hellenic concept of 'con¬ 
tinents’ which was innocuous so long as this concept was employed only 
in its proper nautical context bred a fresh crop of trouble when the 
nautical terminology was once again diverted to a cultural usage. 

The Modern Westerners who adopted and adapted the Hellenic 
mariners’ geographical terminology were the peoples on the eastern 
shores of the Atlantic, from Castile and Portugal northwards, who opened 
a new chapter in both Western history and World history by mastering 
the art of oceanic navigation at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth 
centuries of the Christian Era; and the Hellenic terminology proved still 
to make nautical sense in a situation in which making the sea passage 
between Europe and Asia meant not just swimming across the Darda¬ 
nelles or ferrying over the Aegean but circumnavigating Africa now that 
the banks of the Narrow Seas which divided Asia from Europe by a hair’s 
breadth had been placed out of bounds for Western maritime enterprise 
by the establishment of the Ottoman Empire astride those inland sea¬ 
waters. 

On the oceanic chart drawn by Western navigators in a Modern Age 
of Western history, ‘Europe’ meant the hinterland of the mariners’ own 
home ports from Cadiz to Trondhjem and Helsingfors; ‘Asia’ meant 
the hinterland of another chain of ports, stretching from Maskat and 
Hormuz to Canton and Nagasaki, which the conquest of the Ocean had 
brought within the Western mariners’ range; and ‘Africa’ meant the 
huge peninsula, jutting out from the south shore of the Straits of 
Gibraltar to the Cape of Good Hope, which had to be rounded by 



720 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
travellers between Europe and Asia who were debarred by political 
obstacles from short-circuiting the circumnavigation of the Dark Con¬ 
tinent by using the overland routes across the Bosphorus and the 
Dardanelles or the portages across Egypt and South-West Asia between 
the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. This oceanic application of an 
Aegean nautical terminology fitted all the newly discovered geographical 
facts that had swum into the Western mariners’ ken; 1 but the Modem 
Western geographers entangled themselves in their turn in the intellec¬ 
tual and moral toils that had caught their Hellenic predecessors when 
they set themselves to give the continents a cultural as well as a nautical 
meaning. 

In taking the nautical term ‘Europe’ to serve as a substitute for the 
cultural term ‘Western Christendom’, the Modern Westerners could 
plead an excuse which the Hellenes could not have pleaded when they 
tentatively identified ‘Europe’ with ‘Hellas’ in the fifth century B.c. The 
Hellenic misuse of the name ‘Europe’ was the more wanton of the two 
misnomers, because ‘Hellas’ or to 'EXXrjuiKov was always a perfectly 
serviceable label for the Hellenic Society from the beginning to the end 
of its history, whereas the Modern Westerners found themselves awk¬ 
wardly at a loss, by the end of the seventeenth century, for a collective 
name to designate their own society and culture. The traditional name 
‘Western Christendom’ had ceased to be applicable when, within less 


1 This Modem Western chart of the continents in an oceanic setting justified retro¬ 
spectively the enumeration of a separate continent of ‘Africa' which its Hellenic in¬ 
ventors had never quite succeeded in distinguishing from 'Asia'. The Hellenes had 
been enticed into inventing this Continent of Africa (Grate! Libya) by their passion 
for symmetry. On the Hellenic chart of the waters of the Eastern Mediterranean, the 
mouths of the Nile faced the mouths of the Aegean; and, if the thalweg of the sea- 
drowned river of which the Aegean was the lowest reach marked the boundary between 
Asia and Europe, the law of geographical symmetry required that the thalweg of the Nile 
should similarly demarcate Asia from another continent which could be labelled 'Libya' 
by an extension of the usage of the name of the country’ adjoining Egypt on the west. 
This Hellenic sailors’ distinction between an ‘Asiatic’ and a 'Libyan' bank of the Nile 
would have made sense for a Nile boatman, but not for an Egyptian whose business it 
was to think, not in narrow terms of navigation, but in broad terms of culture. On the 
cultural map the Nile waterway was, of course, the spinal cord of the Egyptiac World, as 
the Aegean Sea was the heart of Hellas. A subsequent increase in geographical know¬ 
ledge led the Hellenic geographers to set back the western boundary’ of Asia from the 
east bank of the Nile to the east coast of the Red Sea; but a still uncut Isthmus of Suez 
presented them, on a miniature scale, with the same insoluble geographical problem as 
the vastly broader isthmus between the head of the Sea of Azov and the Hyperborean 
shore of Ocean Stream, and their eventual discovery that 'Libya' was circumnavigable 
made them still more doubtful about the legitimacy of trying to erect ‘Libya’ into a 
separate continent instead of treating it as a mere peninsula of Asia. It was left to Modern 
Western ocean-faring navigators to demonstrate that, on a marine chart, ‘Africa’ had a 
much better claim than 'Europe' had to rank as something more than a mere excres¬ 
cence of Asia. From the cultural standpoint, or. the other hand, the concept of 'Africa’ 
never made any more sense than the concept of 'Europe’ or of 'Asia'. Africa north of the 
Sahara, which was insulated culturally from Tropical Africa by an estranging desert, 
was linked up culturally with South-W est Asia and Southern Europe by the conductive 
waters of the Mediterranean Sea—as was attested at the time of writing by the distri¬ 
bution of the Arabic language and culture and of the metropolitan territory- of France. 
The Hellenic geographers' misgivings about the feasibility of distinguishing an ‘Africa’ 
from an ‘Asia were justified by the configuration of a latter-day Arabic W orld which 
stretched across South-West Asia and North Africa from ‘Iraq to Morocco inclusive 
without a break. The administrative organization of Algeria to constitute three French 
departments which ranked juridically as an integral part of France herself was a political 
testimony to the geographical fact that, whatever the mariner’s chart might say, the 
Maghrib was for practical purposes a European, not an African, country. 




‘ASIA’ AND ‘EUROPE’ 721 

than half a century of the opening of the modern chapter of Western 
history, the outbreak of the Protestant Reformation had split the 
Western World in two on the ecclesiastical plane; 1 and the retention 
of the word ‘Christendom’ in the tide of the Western World had become 
still more incongruous when, after the close of the Wars of Religion, 
the Westerners—Catholics and Protestants alike—had deliberately 
sloughed off their society’s traditional chrysalis and had proceeded to 
propagate their culture all over the face of the planet in a dehydrated 
secular abstract of its original plenary form. 

When the Western Society’s historic name had thus been made 
obsolete by the early modern course of Western history, the Hcllenistic- 
minded spokesmen of a Modern Western culture consulted their 
familiar Hellenic oracles for guidance in their search for a convenient 
alias for a ‘Christendom’ that had become an awkward terminological 
anachronism in the vocabulary of a post-Christian Western World. 1 
The Hellenes’ geographical concept of a terra finna articulated into 
‘continents’ had served the Hellenes’ Modem Western disciples well 
when they had adopted this Hellenic pattern of geographical thought in 
its original nautical usage. Why not follow a step farther in the Hellenic 

S raphers’ traces by giving the names of the continents a cultural as 
as a navigational connotation ? Reinterpreted on this Hellenic pre¬ 
cedent, the name ‘Europe’ offered an alias for the name ‘Christendom’ 
that was free from the old name’s now misleading religious associations. 
The Western minds that put this Herodotean cultural usage of the word 
‘Europe’ into circulation in the Modern Western World might be for¬ 
given for having failed to perceive that in taking this way of extricating 
themselves from one awkward plight they were implicating themselves 
in another; but, however excusable their error of judgement might be, 
its intellectual and moral consequences for both the West and the World 
were as unfortunate as if these coiners of a secular name for a de¬ 
consecrated Western Christendom had been actuated by malice prepense. 

The most glaring intellectual weakness of this unlucky usage was that 
it was a desperate geographical misfit. A Western World that was now 
calling itself ‘Europe’ had-never embraced the whole of the European 
continent up to the water boundaries assigned to it in the original 
Hellenic nautical usage of the word, while on the other hand the West 
had already expanded overseas into regions which could not be deemed 
to be parts of Europe on any reading of the map. 

The quarter of Europe which was indisputably entitled to bear the 
name was the European hinterland of the shores of the chain of narrow 
seas running up from the mouth of the Aegean to the head of the Sea 
of Azov. This had been the first quarter of the continent to which the 
name ‘Europe’ had ever been applied; but this south-eastern nucleus of 
Europe had always lain outside the bounds of the Western World in the 
medieval as well as in the modern chapter of Western history; it had 
lain, and still lay, within the domain of the main body of Eastern Ortho¬ 
dox Christendom; and an abortive Medieval Western Christian attempt 

« This point has been noticed already in I. i. 33-34. 

» See Halecki, op. cit., p. 51. 



722 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
to annex that alien Christian body social to Western Christendom had 
defeated its own purpose by resulting in the establishment of Ottoman 
Muslim rule over the European as well as the Asiatic provinces of 
Orthodox Christendom with the exception of Russia. 1 A Modern 
Western World which thus fell short of being conterminous with Europe 
in one direction had, however, burst the bounds of Europe in another 
direction when it had inaugurated the opening of the modern chapter of 
Western history by the historic act of mastering the Ocean; 2 and an 
ocean-borne expansion of a hitherto merely West European society over 
the whole face of the planet, which had been initiated in and after the 
turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries of the Christian Era on 
the economic and political planes, was extended, as we have seen, 3 to the 
cultural plane as well, as soon as a former religious impediment to a 
reception of the Western culture by non-Westcm societies had been 
removed by the action of the Westerners themselves in secularizing 
their way of life at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. 
As a label for the domain of the Western Civilization from that date 
onwards, the name ‘Europe’ was thus on the one hand too narrow to 
cover the West’s thenceforth rapidly expanding non-European cultural 
empire, while on the other hand it was too broad to be reconcilable with 
the no less pertinent fact that South-Eastern Europe still lay outside the 
Western Society’s cultural bounds. 

This inapplicability to South-Eastern Europe of the Modern Western 
usage of the word ‘Europe’ as an alias for the Modern Western World 
not only made intellectual nonsense of the cultural situation in that 
culturally non-Western quarter of a ‘continent’ that had no unity, and 
indeed had no existence, in any other setting than a mariner’s chart; 
this Modern Western usage of die word ‘Europe’ as a synonym for the 
West also made moral mischief by suggesting to self-confident and 
self-righteous Modem Western minds the preposterous implication 
that the cultural diversity of South-Eastern Europe from the western 
extremity of ‘the European Continent’ was the monstrous outcome of 
a scandalous miscarriage of History which could be, and should be, put 
right by some benevolently high-handed exercise of Modern Western 
power. In drawing this misguided moral from an erroneous interpreta¬ 
tion of the facts, the Modern West was adopting an attitude towards the 
contemporary Islamic and Orthodox Christian worlds that was bound 
to breed mutual misunderstanding and ill-feeling. 

The Modern Western assumption that South-Eastern Europe was 
part of the Western Civilization’s patrimony ex officio, in virtue of the 
West’s unauthorized appropriation of the name ‘Europe’ as a label for 
itself, was a ‘geopolitical’ dogma that was irreconcilable with the histori¬ 
cal facts; yet the evidence of the facts did not deter nineteenth-century 
Western Liberals from pronouncing pontifically that the Turks were 
trespassers in Rumelia, 4 and that a fortiori these interlopers had no 

1 See pp. 151-2, 362, and 395-7, above. 

1 Thi» point is noticed by Halccki in op. cit., pp. 51 and 54. 

) On pp. 516-18, above. 

4 ‘Rumili’, the Turkish name for Turkey-in-Europc’, meant 'the land of Orthodox 
Christendom’ (Turcici ‘Rem’, signifying the [East] Roman Empire). If South-Eastern 



‘ASIA* AND ‘EUROPE’ 723 

business to bear rule there, because they were ‘Asiatics’, not ‘Europeans’, 
in origin. These impulsive Gladstonians clamoured for the expulsion of 
die Turkish intruders from Europe 'bag and baggage’ 1 without ever 
taking the trouble to put their draconian programme to the proof of 
confronting it with the elementary facts of Ottoman history. These facts 
were that the Ottoman Empire, like its forerunner the Greek Orthodox 
Christian Principality of Nicaea, had expanded over the European 
territories of Orthodox Christendom from a starting-point on Asiatic 
Orthodox Christian ground because it had a political and a social 
mission to perform for the whole of the main body of Orthodox Christen¬ 
dom on both sides of the Straits. Eastern Orthodox Christians had 
acquiesced in Ottoman Muslim rule, in preference to Western Christian 
rule, because their Ottoman conquerors had shown themselves capable 
of imposing peace on a distracted Orthodox Christendom whose confu¬ 
sion had merely been worse confounded by the escapades of the Western 
Crusaders. 

In the nineteenth century of the Christian Era no less than in the 
fourteenth, the acid test for passing judgement on the Ottoman regime 
was the current state of the account between the benefits conferred by 
the Pax Ottomanica on the Padishah’s subjects and the cost of the 
oppression that was the price of an Ottoman Peace; and in the nineteenth 
century an impartial judge might well have pronounced that the Porte 
had exhausted its mandate; but this verdict would have conferred a 
moral claim to liberation from an Ottoman Turkish yoke, not just upon 
the Porte’s non-Turkish subjects in ‘Turkey-in-Europc’, but upon all 
its non-Turkish subjects, whatever religion they professed and whatever 
language they spoke and whatever continent they inhabited. A dis¬ 
credited Ottoman Turkish imperial people’s African and Asiatic Arabic¬ 
speaking Sunni Muslim co-religionists would have had the same good 
case for demanding liberation as the European Orthodox Christians, 
and the Asiatic Arabic-speaking Orthodox Christians and Maronites 
and Druses the same good case as the European Albanian-speaking 
Tosk and Serbo-Croat-speaking Bosniak Sunnis. The test was the 
current balance-sheet of the Ottoman regime, and the issue was a sub¬ 
ject’s moral claim to be liberated from a regime that had forfeited its 
moral title to rule. In this moral issue the query whether the victim of 
misgovernment happened to be domiciled in the European, the Asiatic, 
or the African dominions of its discredited oppressors was pedantically 
irrelevant; and no approach to the nineteenth-century problem of the 

Europe had been Western and not Orthodox Christian ground at the time when the 
'Osmanlis occupied it, they would have called it, not 'Rumili', but ‘Feringhistan’ 
('Frankland'). 

» 'Let the Turks now carry away their abuses in the only possible manner, namely by 
carrying off themselves. Their zaptiehs and their mudirs, their bimbashis and their 
yuzbashis, their kaimakams and their pashas, one and all, shall, I hope, clear out from 
the province they have desolated and profaned' (Gladstone, W. E.: Bulgarian Horrori 
and the Question of the East (London 1876, John Murray), p. 31). 

'The profaned and desolated province' of this celebrated passage was not the whole 
of Turkey-in-Europe but only that portion of Rumelia that was inhabited by the Bulgars; 
but the more sweeping programme proclaimed in the simpler slogan ‘Expel the Turks 
from Europe’ was the ultimate objective of Gladstone and his fellow Turcophobes in a 
nineteenth-century Western World that had identified 'Europe' with itself. 



724 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
Ottoman Empire’s future could well have been more perverse than the 
Modern Western Liberal publicist’s uncritical adoption of the Herodo- 
tean fantasy of a perennial feud between 'Europe’ and ‘Asia’—as if the 
‘European’ subjects of the Ottoman Porte were entitled to liberation, not 
on a moral ground which was equally applicable to their ‘African’ and 
‘Asiatic’ fellow victims, but on the geographical score of being in¬ 
habitants of a privileged continent. 1 

The Modern Western identification of the Western World with 
‘Europe’, which had this distorting effect on Western policy towards the 
Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century, persisted into the twentieth 
century to exacerbate an ideological quarrel between the West and a 
Communist Russia. 

The self-deconsecration of the Western World towards the close of 
the seventeenth century of the Christian Era did not bring with it any 
essential change in the traditional Western attitude towards Orthodox 
Christendom. Since the establishment of a Western military, political, 
and economic ascendancy over the main body of Orthodox Christendom 
in the sequel to the collapse of the East Roman Power, the Medieval 
Westerners had come to look upon their Eastern Orthodox neighbours, 
no longer as their superiors or even as their peers, but as obstinately 
unsatisfactory poor relations who must be coerced into making a public 
confession of sin and profession of repentance, in the form of a solemn 
acknowledgement of the Papacy’s ecclesiastical supremacy over the 
churches of the Greek Rite, as a condition sine gud non for being con¬ 
sidered eligible for receiving Western aid. A latter-day post-Christian 
Western Society which could no longer logically condemn the ‘native 
Christian’ subjects of the Ottoman Empire as religious heretics could 
still preserve and justify a traditional Western contempt for them by 
censuring them as ‘Europeans’ who had inexcusably failed to keep 
up with ‘the progress of European Civilization’. This censure was 
tantamount to a reiteration, in Modern Western secular terms, of the 
Medieval Western Christian demand that the Orthodox Christians 
should renounce their own traditional culture and should adopt in its 
place the contemporary culture of the West. The weak point in the latter- 
day Western ‘geopolitical’ formula for taking Orthodox Christendom to 
task was that a majority of those indicted for the moral offence of being 

1 The fantasy that the evil of nineteenth-century Ottoman misgovemment would be 
cured by expelling the Turks from ‘Europe’ would have been reduced ad abtvrdum if 
this programme had ever become practical politic*. The partition of the Eurasian city 
of Constantinople by a political frontier following the thaliceg of the Bosphorus would 
have been one of the curiosities of political map-making even for a generation that had 
lived to see the bisection of Jerusalem and Vienna and Berlin after the World War of 
A.D. 1919-745. One quaint result of applying the fantastic ‘geopolitical’ principle that 
political liberty was a European privilege would have been to disqualify the chief in¬ 
tellectual leader of a Modern Greek Westernizing movement that had expressed it¬ 
self politically in the partially successful Greek uprising against Ottoman rule in A.D. 
1821. Till the great Greek exodus from Anatolia and Eastern Thrace in and after a.d. 
1922, the Modem Greeks, like the Ancient Greeks before them, were caually at home 
on the European and on the Asiatic side of the Aegean; und Adhamlndtos Korais %vas 
in no way peculiar among the Modem Greeks of his generation in being a Smymiot of 
Chiot origin (see pp. 178-9, above). This eminent scholar-patriot would have been as sur¬ 
prised to be told that his Asiatic provenance made him ineligible for liberation from 
Ottoman rule as he would have been to hear that his Arabic surname (see p. 178, n. 4, 
above) debarred him from being reckoned as a Greek. 



■ASIA’ AND ‘EUROPE' 725 

‘lapsed Europeans’ were actually not inhabitants of Europe on any 
defensible definition of the boundaries of that elusive continent. Half the 
Modern Greek people lived in Asia, while the whole of Russia defied the 
most determined efforts of geographical pedantry to partition her be¬ 
tween an ‘Asia’ and a ‘Europe’ that melted into one another round the 
head of the Sea of Azov. 

The self-secularization of the West thus left the Western attitude 
towards Orthodox Christendom essentially unchanged, but it did never¬ 
theless temporarily relieve the tension between the two sister societies 
by changing the Orthodox Christian peoples’ feeling towards the West 
from an invincible repugnance to a frank admiration. The seventeenth- 
century distillation of a secular abstract of the Western culture was 
promptly followed, as we have seen,' by a movement in Orthodox 
Christendom to adopt this attractive as well as anodyne new form of a 
previously repulsive alien civilization; and this spontaneous Greek, 
Serb, and Russian imitation of a latter-day secular Western way of life 
was, of course, flattering to the Westerners’ self-conceit. The Tsar Peter 
Romanov’s exemplary good conduct half persuaded the Western dominie 
to forget the bad mark inscribed in his black book against the name of 
the Oecumenical Patriarch Michael Cerularius, and the next two cen¬ 
turies of Orthodox Christian cultural history confirmed in Western 
minds this reassuring impression that the truant ‘East Europeans’ had 
at last seen the light and turned over a new leaf. The dismay and indigna¬ 
tion in the West were therefore proportionately extreme when in aj>. 
1917 Russia suddenly deviated from the broad way leading to Western¬ 
ization which she had been following since the close of the seventeenth 
century, and when she added insult to injury by resuming her pre- 
Petrine ideological war against the West in the name, no longer of Chris¬ 
tian Orthodoxy, but of a post-Christian heresy of Western origin. An 
impartial judge of the issue between the Russian version of Communism 
and the contemporaryWestern way of life might perhaps have given judge¬ 
ment against the Russian party to the suit, but he certainly would not have 
found an aggravating circumstance in Russia’s alleged apostasy from an 
imaginary' ‘European Civilization’ which would have had no geographical 
claim on Russia’s allegiance even if it had had any existence in real life. 

This mirage of a ‘European Civilization’ was another hallucination to 
which Modern Western Man condemned himself when he appropriated 
the word ‘Europe’ as a name for a deconsecrated Western World. His 
cultural misapplication of a nautical term inevitably led him into nvo 
historical aberrations. One of these was the notion that Orthodox 
Christendom and Western Christendom constituted a single society 
because their geographical domains, taken together, were deemed to be 
coextensive with the limits of the mariner’s European continent. The 
second aberration was the notion that Hellenic history and Western 
history were—not distinct social experiences that might be philosophi¬ 
cally contemporaneous as well as philosophically equivalent in value 2 — 

* On pp. 132-3 and 161-5 above. 

1 For these two conceptions of the mutual relations between societies of the species 
called civilizations, see 1. i. 172-7. 



726 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 
but historically continuous as well as chronologically successive acts in 
a single European drama which was deemed to be a unity in virtue of 
its having the wonder-working soil of a privileged continent as its scene 
of action throughout the play. This ‘European’ rendering of Western 
and Orthodox Christian and Hellenic history could not face the music 
of the historical facts. 

The thesis that the Western and Orthodox Christian cultures were 
not two cultures but one culture in virtue of their combined domains 
being coextensive with ‘Europe’ had found one of its ablest advocates, 
down to the time of writing, in a distinguished twentieth-century Polish 
historian. 1 In his exposition of this theme, Halecki strengthens his case 
by conceding that Europe had been an intelligible field of historical 
study only during a limited period that was admittedly already at an end 
by the date at which the European author was writing his book as an 
exile in America. 1 The European Age, as Halecki defines it, was both 
followed and preceded by an age in which the intelligible field of study, 
instead of being delimited by the coasts of a continent, was constituted 
by the shores of a land-locked Sea. In Halccki’s view the European Age 
had succeeded a Mediterranean Age 3 and was being succeeded by an 
Atlantic Age. 4 The making of Europe had been completed in the second 
half of the tenth century of the Christian Era, when Poland, Hungary, 
and the Scandinavian countries had been converted to Western Chris¬ 
tianity and Russia converted to Orthodox Christianity. 5 The destruction 
of Europe had been completed in the fifth decade of the twentieth cen¬ 
tury, when the eastern half of the continent had been severed from the 
West by the descent of a Soviet Russian ‘iron curtain’—a catastrophe 
that had been as lethal for Europe as the Primitive Muslim Arab con¬ 
quest of South-West Asia and North Africa in the seventh century had 
been lethal for an antecedent Mediterranean World. 6 The transition 
from the Mediterranean to the European Age had been a gradual pro¬ 
cess, and the eventual transition from the European to the Atlantic Age 
had been more gradual still. 7 In round numbers of centuries, however, 
Halecki dates his European Age between a.d. 950 and a . d . 1950. 8 

This is a moderate and persuasive presentation of the case for giving 
the word ‘Europe’ a cultural connotation in addition to its plain nautical 
meaning. Yet even Halccki’s presentation is vulnerable. For example, 
the assumption that, in ‘the European Age’, the combined areas of an 
Orthodox and a Western Christendom were conterminous with Europe 
is one that will not bear examination. During the first century of Halecki’s 
European millennium, the centre of gravity of Orthodox Christendom 
still lay outside Europe, in an Anatolian Peninsula known as ‘Asia 
Minor’, 9 while a 'Europa Minor’ in the shape of the Iberian Peninsula 
lay outside the domain of Western Christendom, in Dar-al-Islam. On 
the second of these two points, Halecki might perhaps reply that, in the 

1 Oskar Halecki, in The Limits and Divisions 0] European History (London 1950, 
Sheed and Ward). » See op. cit., p. 10. 

1 See ibid., p. 29. * See ibid., p. 54. 

* See ibid., pp. 39-40. Cp. pp. 28-29 and 36-37. 



‘ASIA’ AND 'EUROPE' 727 

Iberian Peninsula in that century, the majority of the population seems 
still to have consisted of an Arab and Berber Muslim dominant minority’s 
musta'rib Western Christian subjects; but this rejoinder will not revali¬ 
date his thesis that, during 'the European millennium', Europe and 
Christendom were coextensive; for, even if, during the first half of that 
millennium, Western Christendom was confined within Europe’s coasts, 
Orthodox Christendom continued to straddle the Aegean Sea and the 
Straits, with one foot in Europe and the other in Asia, until the exodus 
of Orthodox Christians from Anatolia in a.d. 1922, while, during the 
second half of the same millennium, when Western Christendom was 
spreading into the New World, Orthodox Christendom’s Russian off¬ 
shoot spread right across the breadth of Asia till it reached the western 
shore of the Pacific and leaped over the Behring Straits into the Alaskan 
Peninsula of North America. 

Moreover, the Orthodox and the Western Christendom were only 
two out of four sectors into which the circular wave of Christianity had 
come to be articulated in the course of its expansion. 1 The Roman sector 
in Western Europe and the Orthodox sector in Eastern Europe and Ana¬ 
tolia were balanced by a Monophysite sector extending from Armenia to 
Abyssinia inclusive through Syria and the Nile Valley and by a Ncstorian 
sector extending from ‘Iraq to the north-east corner of Intramural 
China; and neither of these two other quarters of Christendom had any 
foothold in Europe. During the first 250 years of Halccki’s European 
millennium, before the mass-conversions to Islam on the eve of the fall 
of the ‘ Abbasid Caliphate of Baghdad, a Monophysite Christendom that 
still embraced the peasantry of Egypt and a Ncstorian Christendom that 
still embraced the peasantry of ‘Iraq were perhaps each of them as 
strong in numbers as either their Orthodox or their Western sister 
Christian society; and, when the whole of Christendom, instead of 
merely two arbitrarily selected quarters of it, 2 is thus taken into account, 
it becomes manifest that either Asia or Africa could have disputed 
Europe’s claim to style herself ‘the Christian Continent’ par excellence 
until at least the first four out of Halecki’s ten European centuries had 
run out. If there was a moment—between the late medieval decline of 
the Monophysite and Nestorian Christian waves in Africa and Asia and 
the early modern advance of the Orthodox and Western Christian waves 
into Asia and the Americas—at which Christendom and Europe were in 
truth approximately conterminous, that moment cannot have had a 
longer duration than the hundred years immediately preceding the 
Western mariners’ conquest of the Ocean in the later decades of the 
fifteenth century. Yet, even during that brief interval, the identity be¬ 
tween Europe and Christendom was imperfect; for, in the fourteenth 
and fifteenth centuries of the Christian Era, an Islam that was still 

* See II. ii. 360-9. 

1 Halecki’s arbitrariness in deeming an Orthodox and a Western Christendom to 
constitute n unitary Christian society, to the exclusion of both a Monophysite and a 
Nestorian Christendom, is capped by his arbitrariness in excluding Muscovy, and 
a fortiori the Soviet Union, from a Europe which, for him, is synonymous with Christen¬ 
dom, when he has bestowed the freedom of Europe on Muscovy’s predecessor Kievan 
Russia (op. cit., p. 92), as well as on a predominantly Anatolian East Roman Empire 
(op. cit., p. 93). 



728 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

clinging to a remnant of its own domain in a European Andalusia was 
already encroaching on Christendom’s domain in a European Rumclia 
as well as in an African Nubia' and in an Asiatic Tr 5 q and Azerbaijan. 1 

While Europe thus failed to provide a geographical framework for the 
merger of Orthodox with Western Christendom in a single unitary 
Christian Civilization, it likewise failed to provide an historical frame¬ 
work for the merger of an Hellenic with a post-Christian Western cul¬ 
ture in a single unitary' Rationalist Civilization. The thesis that the 
Western and Hellenic cultures were not two cultures but one culture 
because they were both alike informed by some common distinctive 
quality that could be identified as being ‘European’ was one that could 
be sustained only if this hypothetical common ‘European’ quality could 
be shown to have been not merely distinctive but dominant in a soi- 
disant ‘European’ cultural tradition; and this condition in its turn re¬ 
quired that, if any non-European contributions to this European cultural 
heritage could be detected, they should prove to be elements that were not 
of more than minor importance. It is evident that the thesis refutes itself 
as soon as it is thus elucidated; for it wrecks itself on two rocks at once: 
the Jewish contribution to a Western Civilization that was a Christian 
civilization as well as a Hellenistic one, and the Asiatic Greek contribu¬ 
tion to Hellenism. The Asiatic Greeks, as we have seen, had been the 
pioneers of the Hellenic Civilization in the first chapter of its history-, 
and Ionian Asiatic Greek men of science had been the intellectual fathers 
of a Rationalism which was taken by Modern Western minds to be the 
unbroken golden thread of a ‘European’ cultural tradition, 3 but this 
latter-day Western belief in a ‘rationalist’ civilization’s continuity was 
achieved at the intellectual price of ignoring the spiritual history of the 
Hellenic World after the generation of Carneadcs 4 and the spiritual 
history of the Western World before the generation of Descartes. 

A distortion of the historical facts which the chimaera of a ‘European 
Civilization’ demanded from its votaries was aggravated by the hybris 
which was the moral nemesis of this intellectual error. The Modern 
Western Narcissus who had once persuaded himself to believe in the 
reality of a distinctive ‘European’ tradition of civilization culminating 
in the way of life of the observer’s own society in his own age was apt 
to lose his balance so completely as to equate this imaginary ‘European 
Civilization’ with ‘Civilization’ satis phrase and to deny the title to rank 
as civilizations to representatives of this species of society whose geo¬ 
graphical domains happened to lie on the wrong side of the Argonauts’ 
track. 5 A Modern Westerner who had ruled all non-Europeans out of 

< Sec Trimingham, J. S.: Islam in the Sudan (Oxford 1949, University Press), pp. 
79-84. 

1 Sec Budge, E. A. Wallis: The Monks of Kiiblai Khan (London 1928, Religious Tract 
Society), pp. 76-88. 

J A characteristically judicious and discriminating statement, by Edwyn Bcvan, of 
the cue for regarding Hellenic and Western history as the history- of a single 'rationalist’ 
civilization will be found in V. v. 6, n. J. 

4 The metamorphosis of Hellenic philosophy into religion from the generation of 
Poseidonius onwards has been noticed in V. v. 546-9. 

» The geopolitical counier-manceuvre of equating 'Civilization' with 'Asiatic Civiliza¬ 
tion’ would have been equally facile and, of course, equally illegitimate. On the analogy 
of the Modem Western manoeuvre that has been exposed above, this counter-manoeuvre 



•ASIA’ AND 'EUROPE’ 


729 

his reckoning of human achievement was indeed in danger of finding 
himself in a dizzy position. Now that he had piled his Western Pelion 
on an Hellenic Ossa, must he not be on the verge of scaling Olympus? 
The catastrophic ending of the Titans’ impious enterprise according to 
the traditional version of the Hellenic myth gave a sardonic answer to 
the Westerner's conceited rhetorical question. The sin of hybris always 
makes the sinner prone to fall a victim to an egocentric illusion which is 
the intellectual corollary of Original Sin, 1 and in the Weltanschauung of 
a student of History this egocentric illusion is apt to conspire with the 
misconception of growth as a movement in a straight line 2 to produce a 
thorough-going misinterpretation of the history of Mankind. 

This had proved to be the penalty that a ‘European’ must pay for the 
folly of deifying his own continent to the disparagement of the rest of 
the World; and the consequences of this ‘European’ folly were mani¬ 
festly more serious for a post-Christian Frenchman or Englishman than 
for a pre-Christian Athenian or Peloponnesian; for the European Greeks 
who allowed themselves to feel superior to their Asiatic Greek contem¬ 
poraries in the fifth century b.c. were at any rate free from that fanatical 
Judaic hallucination of being a ‘chosen people’ which, in the twentieth 
century of the Christian Era, insidiously haunted and misinspired the 
secular-minded heirs of a once Christian Western tradition. In adopting 
the name ‘Europe’ as a substitute for Western Christendom, the Modern 
Western World had replaced a misnomer that was merely an anachro¬ 
nism by a misnomer that was seriously misleading. 

could have been executed in two steps. In the first place the Hellenic Civilization could 
have been called ‘Asiatic’ without departing farther from the truth than the departure 
made by Aeschylus and Herodotus and their Modem Western followers when they 
labelled as ‘European’ a civilization that bestrode both continents. In the second place 
the mantle of Hellenism could have been declared to have fallen upon the shoulders of 
Orthodox Christendom without doing any greater violence to the facts of history than 
was done by Westerners who claimed that the West was Hellas’ sole heir, when the truth 
was that the two sister Hellenistic civilizations of Western and Eastern Orthodox 
Christendom were both equally entitled to claim heirship to the Hellenic heritage. This 
counter-Western inversion of a Western misinterpretation of history would have led 
straight to the conclusion that there was an ‘Asiatic Civilization’ which was tantamount 
to ‘Civilization’ with a capital 'C\ 

1 This egocentric illusion has been examined in I. i. 157-64. 

* Sec I.i. 168-71. 



IX. D (ii), ANNEX ■ 

THE MERCENARY SOLDIER’S ROLE AS A 
CULTURAL SPEARHEAD 

If an assaulted society succumbs to Human Nature’s instinctive irra¬ 
tional abhorrence of anything that is alien and unfamiliar when the 
challenge takes the form of an encounter with a militarily superior 
neighbour, the consequences of this instinctive reaction sometimes illus¬ 
trate the truth that to yield to the promptings of fear is apt to be the 
most dangerous of all possible alternative courses. 

The at first sight apparently most non-committal way for an assaulted 
society to enlist in its own defence its assailant’s military technique is, 
not the hard course of acquiring, handling, and eventually manufacturing 
for itself the weapons and equipment, and mastering the drill, tactics, 
strategy, and military organization, that are the secrets of the assailant’s 
military superiority, but the facile expedient of simply hiring repre¬ 
sentatives of this militarily superior impinging society to wield their own 
exotic weapons, execute their own exotic tactics and strategy, and apply 
their own exotic organization as mercenary soldiers, officers, and adminis¬ 
trators in the assaulted society’s service. In other contexts' we have 
observed how civilizations embodied in universal states have delivered 
themselves into the hands of the transfronticr barbarians when they have 
followed the clever-seeming device of setting a thief to catch a thief by 
recruiting barbarian mercenary troops to defend the times against the 
barbarian war-bands that are assailing it. Civilizations have also brought 
the same fate on themselves by the still more hazardous manauvre of 
enlisting the military services of militarily superior neighbours when 
these neighbours have been, not barbarians, but representatives of a 
society of the employer-society’s own species. 

Instances in which the enlistment of mercenary' troops from the ranks 
of a militarily superior alien civilization has paved the way for the estab¬ 
lishment of this alien civilization’s domination over the society that has 
thus with its own hands introduced a Trojan Horse into its precincts arc 
the enlistment of Hellenic mercenary troops by the Achaemenian Im¬ 
perial Government during the hundred years ending in Alexander’s 
passage of the Dardanelles in 334 b.c. 2 and the enlistment of Toltec 
mercenaries to fight the fratricidal battles of the city-states of Yucatan 
in the last chapter of Yucatec history' before the forcible incorporation 
of the Yucatec Civilization into the Mexic—if this is the correct recon¬ 
struction of that chapter of Central American history . 3 The enlistment 
of Norman and other Western Christian mercenaries by the East Roman 
Imperial Government during the 150 years ending in the overthrow of 
the East Roman Empire by so-called ‘Crusaders’ in a.d. 1204 likewise 
prepared the way for this eventual disaster—and in this case the ulti¬ 
mately disastrous consequence of employing mercenaries recruited from 

* See V. v. 159-69; VI. vii. 329-38; and pp. 41-44, above. 

* See VI. vii. 328-9. 1 See I. i. 123-4. 



THE MERCENARY AS CULTURAL SPEARHEAD 73* 
a society in process of civilization is the more remarkable, considering 
that the East Roman Empire—like the Carthaginian Empire in its day— 
had been singularly successful in eluding the similar disaster which it 
had courted by enlisting the services of all manner of barbarians, ranging 
from the horse-archers of the Eurasian Steppe to the Scandinavian and 
English axe-men who manned the Varangian Imperial Guard. 

This political risk to which a civilization exposes itself in giving mili¬ 
tary employment to members of an alien society of its own species is not 
eliminated when the employer-society abstains from enlisting an alien 
rank-and-file and confines itself to commissioning alien officers to take 
command of native troops. The handful of Western soldiers of fortune 
who were employed in this capacity by the governments of the native 
Indian successor-states of the Mughal Raj in India during the hundred 
years ending in the final overthrow of the Sikh Power by British arms in 
a . d . 1849 wcrc forerunners of an alien universal state of Western origin 
in the shape of the British Raj. 1 This Indian experience indicates that 
alien military officers cannot be employed with impunity unless their 
function is restricted—as it was in Petrine Russia and in the Ottoman 
Empire under the regime inaugurated by Selim III and Mahmud II— 
to providing an alien leaven for a corps of officers in which the personnel 
is still recruited in the main from native sources even after the reception 
of an alien military technique and alien art of war. 

One of the lines along which the private Western military adventurers 
in a post-Mughal India blazed a trail for the British East India Company, 
and eventually for the British Crown, was their practice of undertaking 
the organization as well as the command of the armies of the Mughal 
Raj’s successor-states, insisting on their employers’ assigning to them 
portions of their land revenues to finance this new-model military 
organization, and finally taking over the administration of the districts 
producing these revenues in order to ensure the collection of their dues. 
This was the method by which the East India Company succeeded in 
swiftly transforming its own relation with one local Indian state after 
another from a casual and temporary military alliance into a political 
control which was apt to grow progressively more effective until at last 
it became indistinguishable from a plenary sovereignty. 

‘The system soon reached the stage when the native ally was required 
to supply not men but money, and the English undertook to raise, train, 
and pay a fixed number of troops on receiving a subsidy equivalent to 
their cost. . . . Large sums had hitherto been spent by the native princes 
in maintaining ill-managed and insubordinate bodies of troops, and in 
constant wars against each other; they might economise their revenues, 
be rid of a mutinous soldiery, and sit much more quietly at home, by 
entering into contracts with a skilful and solvent administration that would 
undertake all serious military business for a fixed subsidy. But, as punc¬ 
tuality in money matters has never been a princely quality, this subsidy 
was apt to be paid very irregularly; so the next stage was to revive the 

1 See Compton, H.: A Particular Account of the European Military Adventurers of 
Hindustan from 1784 to 1803 (London 1892, Fisher Unwin) and Grey, C., and Garrett, 
H. L. O.: European Adventurers in Northern India, 1783-1849 (Lahore 1929, Punjab 
Government Press). 



732 ENCOUNTERS BETWEEN CONTEMPORARIES 

long-standing practice of Asiatic governments: the assignment of lands for 
the payment of troops. . . . 

‘The Oudh Vizier was a weak ruler whose country was in confusion, 
whose troops were mutinous, and whose finances were disordered by the 
heavy strain of the English subsidy. In these circumstances Lord Wellesley 
required the Vizier to disband his disorderly forces in order that more 
British troops might be subsidized for the effective defence of his domi¬ 
nions. . . . The Vizier ceded all his frontier provinces, including Rohil- 
cund, to the Company, the revenue of the territory thus transferred being 
taken as an equivalent to the subsidy payable for troops. . . . And Oudh 
was thenceforward enveloped by the English dominion. This most im¬ 
portant augmentation of territory transferred to the British Government 
some of the richest and most populous districts in the heart of India.’ 1 

' Lv*U, Sir A.: The Rise and Expansion oj the British Dominion in India (London 
1894. John Murray), pp. 245-7. 



TABLE OF BARBARIAN WAR-BANDS 



Barbarian War-Bands 

















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